Fiore seemed to be reading his mind.
“You’re probably dying to get in that slick red Land Rover of yours, haul your ass down to the Bedford Hills general store or whatever they call it, and see what’s in this morning’s Post. Am I right?”
Jeffrey didn’t answer.
“Well, I’ve got good news for you, Jeffrey,” Fiore said. “There’s nothing in this morning’s Post. No column. Not a word. Mr. Garver has very graciously agreed to hold off publication for a little while.”
“Why would he do that?” Jeffrey asked.
“I imagine he figured it was in his best interest.”
“Are you saying you threatened him?”
Fiore laughed again, but this time he let the mockery in his laughter show.
“You know I’m not saying that,” he said. “If you know anything at all, Mr. B, you know for certain you didn’t hear me say that.”
All right, Jeffrey thought wryly, this gangster saved my ass. Saved it from what? An embarrassing scandal. What else? Nothing else. He dug a hole and we both climbed into it, and then he pulled it in after him. Magic. Alchemy. He changed an embarrassment into a felony, and now, right now, this minute, not one minute later, Jeffrey Blaine could either accept the consequences of that concealed felony or he could take whatever steps needed to be taken to walk away from them.
Later, when he looked back at the twelve hours that began the moment his daughter said Daddy, I’d like you to meet Eddie Vincenzo and ran until this moment, what surprised him most was how simple the decision seemed to be. If it was even a decision at all. Every act of his life to that point had been based on a clear and compelling, an uncomplicated and unproblematic sense of what was right and what was expected.
And it worked, hadn’t it? He was a successful man.
But…
It was the same but that had sent a chill through his body at the party last night. There is a sense one has, when one has everything, that everything is surely enough. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
But it doesn’t. It never has, it never does.
It seemed, he thought, so much simpler to be Chet Fiore than to be Jeffrey Blaine.
Before he could say anything, before he could even announce that he was accepting the terms of Chet Fiore’s offer, whatever that offer might be, Fiore turned away, having heard a sound in the house, and Jeffrey’s eyes turned, too.
Phyllis was standing at the far end of the living room. “Oh,” she said. “Good morning, Mr. Fiore.”
She was in a short nightgown that came halfway down her thighs. Her hair was tossed from sleep and her bare arms seemed to glow alabaster in the light from the skylight. She was conscious of how she looked as she walked across the room and extended her hand. “I hope there are no problems,” she said.
Jeffrey kissed her on the cheek, conscious, too, of Fiore’s eyes on her. She should have put something on. “We didn’t wake you, did we?” he said.
And Fiore said, “This is a beautiful house, Mrs. Blaine. No, I don’t think there are any problems.”
He had a very charming smile.
7
Schliester and Gogarty went out for breakfast after getting their asses reamed and cleaned by Dennis Franciscan. Over pancakes and eggs, they decided that Franciscan’s order to leave Fiore alone didn’t extend to Jeffrey Blaine. There was no reason they couldn’t follow up from that end, and if the questions they asked about Mr. Blaine involved Mr. Fiore, that still wasn’t exactly the same thing.
They looked Blaine up and found out where he lived. Fifth Avenue, right across the street from Central Park. It figured.
The doorman popped through the door the moment they pulled to a stop. “Yes, sir?” he said.
Gogarty got out of the car. Schliester remained in the passenger seat.
“Just wanted to ask you a few questions,” Gogarty said. “About one of your tenants. About some guests they might have had.”
Jakob Beider’s mouth went instantly dry. He was sixty-two years old. Three years ago he retired after thirty-five years at a rental building on the Upper West Side where the police were always asking the doormen about the comings and goings of the tenants. He hated it, being constantly caught between the cops, who made vague threats and accused him of being a bad citizen, and the tenants, who accused him of talking too much and made much more detailed threats. Jakob and all the other doormen knew better than to answer questions from the police, but the endless hassles wore him down. For years he had been looking for a better job but never found one, and so he put in for retirement the minute he had accumulated enough time for his union pension. After a year of doing nothing, he heard about an opening on Fifth Avenue in the Nineties, the kind of building that never got visited by the police.
Now here they were again. One sitting in the car, one on the sidewalk. Nothing ever changes.
“Could I see some identification?” Jakob said.
Gogarty tipped his head slightly, as though the question confused him. Slowly, like a man reaching for his wallet to pay a very large hotel bill, he removed a leather case from his breast pocket, flipped it open, looked at it himself a moment, and then displayed the contents. Almost as though the gesture were a signal, the second man got out of the car and came around to stand next to his partner. Jakob looked at the identification card Gogarty showed him. The man was a federal agent, not a cop. In thirty-five years, Jakob had seen more than his share of those IDs, too.
He looked up, into the agent’s eyes, and said nothing.
“What’s your name?” Gogarty asked. When they ask you for identification, you ask them to identify themselves.
“Jakob. Jakob Beider.”
“And you’ve got a tenant named Blaine,” Gogarty said.
“No, no tenants. This isn’t a rental building,” Jakob said.
Gogarty smiled but it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “Choice of words, Gustav. Whatever you call them, there’s a family living here named Blaine.”
It didn’t sound like a question, so Jakob didn’t answer it.
“Yes or no?”
“The Blaines, yes.”
“All right, Wilhelm, now we’re getting somewhere. See how much better this is?”
Jakob didn’t necessarily see.
“Have you ever seen this man visiting here?” Gogarty asked.
He took out a small photo of Chet Fiore. The picture was years old. Fiore appeared to be in his twenties.
Jakob looked at the picture and handed it back. He shook his head.
“That means he hasn’t been here?”
“I do not know this man. This is all I can tell you.”
For a moment Gogarty considered asking the doorman to ring up the Blaines’ apartment. It might be fun to ask Blaine himself if he knew the man in the picture. But what would be the point? If there was anything worth looking into here, it would only serve to alert Blaine that it was being looked into. A good investigator is like one of those old-fashioned gods who is not allowed to meddle with human destiny, and Gogarty was a good investigator. Given the choice, he always chose to let things happen.
Schliester also thought of himself as a good investigator, although not necessarily as a god. He believed in asking the next question.
“What do you say we ring up the Blaines and ask them?” he said. “What do you think, Jakob? Think we might find out you’re lying to us?”
The more Gogarty saw of this St. Louis kid, the more he liked him. The kid tended to go off half-cocked, but half a cock is better than none. He had style. And he wasn’t always checking his watch. Gogarty had a partner once who couldn’t wait for the shift to end. It was like being buried alive.
“You cannot do that,” Jakob said.
“Oh, I’ve got a badge, Jakob,” Schliester said. “I can do whatever I want.”
Jakob liked this man. He didn’t make fun of his name like the other one did. “No one is home,” he said. “They come in last night, they go out.”
Schli
ester raised an eyebrow. “They went out? In the middle of the night?”
“House in the country,” Jakob said. “Somewhere. I don’t know.”
Schliester and Gogarty were thinking the same thing. It seemed like a funny thing to do in the middle of a snowstorm in the middle of the night.
But then, rich people did funny things.
Gaetano Falcone made his home in a comfortable though far from lavish beach house in Orient Point on the north shore of Long Island, over a hundred miles out from the city. The backyard stretched to the water’s edge. He liked to watch the birds that came to the seed feeders strategically placed around the grounds, cardinals and woodpeckers and nuthatches, ugly little starlings and brazen titmice that waited impatiently in the forsythia only a foot or two away when he filled their feeders. He especially liked the shore birds, the raucous gulls and the patient cormorants, the sandpipers who patrolled his beach on thin uncanny legs.
He lived as simply as he did because he believed that a man in his line of work was a fool if he called attention to himself.
Anyone who had any reason to know these things knew that Gaetano Falcone was the most powerful man in the New York underworld. Twenty years ago he united the families under his leadership. A whole generation of powerful young men like Chet Fiore grew up without ever knowing a day when the men to whom they reported didn’t report to Gaetano Falcone.
Falcone liked Fiore well enough, although he didn’t like the fact that he drove a foreign car. He was waiting in front of the house, feet planted wide, when a Mercedes rolled up and stopped only a few feet away. It was crimson red. Fiore’s car was blue. Falcone looked at it with distaste, dispensing with the amenities of a greeting. “What? You traded it in already?” he asked even before Fiore was out of the car.
“It’s a loaner,” Fiore said. “There was a little accident. You’re looking good, Mr. Falcone.”
Falcone grabbed a handful of the soft flesh around his waist as though he were about to ball it up and throw it away. “Ah,” he scoffed, “I’ve got to do something about this. The wife does exercises every day. If she gets any thinner people are going to start wondering what she’s doing with a fat old man like me.”
Fiore laughed because he was supposed to. He said, “I don’t think so, Mr. Falcone.”
“Come on,” Falcone growled, “we’ll go around the back, have some coffee, some fruit.”
They walked around the house. There was no snow on the ground. The storm must have turned off somewhere before it got this far out on the island.
At the back of the house, in the middle of the sloping yard, was a spacious greenhouse that Falcone called his solarium. Part of it was set up with comfortable furniture, and the old man liked to entertain guests here. They could have entered through the house but he preferred the walk around the yard.
“How is this business coming?” he asked as soon as they were settled inside. He broke a macaroon in half and popped one of the pieces into his mouth.
“It’s coming just the way we talked about, Mr. Falcone,” Fiore said.
“This man Blaine, are you sure he’s the right man?”
Fiore was sure. Blaine had listened to everything he had to say. No commitments were made, but he had listened. Yes, he was the right man.
He could have said this but he elected not to. He sipped at his coffee and then loosened his tie before answering. It was hot in here. “You put this thing in my hands, Mr. Falcone,” he said. “Do you see any reason to question my judgment now?”
The pitch of his voice had to be absolutely perfect, because he was, no matter how one construed it, challenging Falcone’s right to question him. It was a gamble on Fiore’s part. He was betting that Falcone would elect to admire his willingness to take full responsibility.
The older man’s eyes narrowed for a moment. “No,” he said. “No reason to question.”
He stood up and walked back to the glass wall. A few yards away, a thick hedge of wild roses lined a foot-high stone wall that protected the land from the beach and the water beyond.
Fiore joined him there. Far to their left a bright orange sun dove into the water, lighting it on fire. The sun set so early this time of year it hardly seemed there was any day at all. Which was more or less the way men like Gaetano Falcone and Chet Fiore liked it.
“This man is willing to help us?” Falcone said. “This is all I need to know.”
Fiore considered carefully before answering. “He is,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “We haven’t talked about it yet, but he’s interested. He’s restless. Before he signs on, he’s going to have to find the justification.”
“However you have to do it,” Falcone answered indifferently.
“Not just yet,” Fiore said. “If he does it because he wants to, because he’s rich and bored, I don’t know how far I can trust him. I want him to have a better reason.”
Falcone smiled and nodded. He had always admired Charles’s thoroughness. Almost from the first time he met Fiore, years ago now, he had singled him out for advancement. The young man had imagination and he paid attention to the details. The two didn’t come together in the same man very often.
“You do your experiments on this man,” he said, “that’s fine with me. Just so it comes out in the right place.”
“Of course, Mr. Falcone,” Fiore said.
“You understand how important this is, Charles. We can’t keep going the way we’ve been going, hiding our money in suitcases.”
It had been a long time since Falcone or any of his people hid their money in suitcases. Complex money-laundering systems did the work once done by pizza parlors and brown paper bags. But the money-laundering apparatus was the weak link in the food chain that fed the beast. Its capacity set limits on the business the families could do, and when those limits were exceeded, as they usually were, that’s when the families became vulnerable, that’s when arrests were made.
“It’s a new century,” Falcone went on, almost as though he were talking to himself.
If he was an old man by Fiore’s standards, he showed no signs of it. Not in the strength of his arms, not in the reach of his mind.
Fiore smiled, enjoying and absorbing the sense of power that came off Gaetano Falcone the way the vast and reassuring hum of the ocean came off the waves that stretched in front of him out beyond the lawn and the wild roses and the stone wall.
PART THREE
8
Jeffrey read the last paragraph a second time. He took a sip of his coffee and reached into his breast pocket for his pen. He uncapped it and wrote This is unfundable next to Roger Bogard’s signature at the bottom of the report. He added his initials. The pen hovered a moment. He wanted to add, Why the hell do we have a research department? or Did anyone check this with Research? or even Why am I reading this drivel?
Every week at least two proposals came onto his desk that embodied absolutely no thought at all. The younger people in the department thought of themselves as visionaries, forever on the verge of discovering the next unexpected growth industry, the next Microsoft or Federal Express. They might as well have tried to fund a fleet of sailing ships to find the Northwest Passage. Sometimes the young people around him made Jeffrey feel prematurely wise, even though he was barely a decade older than most of them. His solid good sense, like a paradoxical kind of gravity, helped him rise quickly. He was barely thirty when he made his first million, thirty-five when he made partner. And he was still a young man with a long way to go, a long career that stretched out in front of him like a lit road.
On the other hand, while he didn’t approve of the attitudes he saw around him, he didn’t quite disapprove either. Greed, some people called it. But Jeffrey saw it as a kind of top-down energy, an unboundedness that he missed in his own life. He had only recently begun asking himself if there was something the matter with him. He knew that he wasn’t a dull man, but more and more he felt that he had let himself become dull. Certainly he knew he looked that
way to his daughter. Maybe, after all, he should be funding those fleets of sailing ships. Or even sailing on them, alone at twilight on the quarterdeck, eyes scanning the shoreline for that mysterious and elusive channel to another ocean.
He slipped the report into his briefcase and checked his watch. Eight-fifteen.
“Martin, please ask the doorman to ring up,” he said.
Without a word, Martin got out of the car and went into the lobby. Through the heavy glass door Jeffrey could see him talking on the doorman’s intercom, then handing it back to the doorman and returning to the car. He came around and got in behind the wheel. “Says she’s on the way,” Martin said.
Jeffrey stared at the lobby and took a sip of coffee. It was cold already. He drank it down and refilled it from the carafe. While he was doing this, the door next to him opened and Jessica said, “Slide over, Daddy.”
He wondered whether he would have thought her beautiful if she hadn’t been his daughter. He was able, at least now, to see her exactly the way she actually looked, tweedy and skirted, as innocent as the child he still believed her to be. She had her mother’s fine bones and chiseled mouth, her mother’s radiant hair. But she had his eyes, which lacked brightness and color and were too close together, and his awkward, gangling posture.
She reached out and took his coffee cup, then handed it back to him after he slid over behind Martin.
“Coffee?” he asked.
She shook her head, looked at his cup, and sighed. He knew that she disapproved of china cups in a car, but she had never explained her feelings except to say it was ridiculous. “Why is it ridiculous?” he had asked. “It just is, that’s all,” she had said. “I can’t believe you can’t see it.”
The two of them had hardly spoken a word over the weekend. Except for brief appearances at meals, at which nothing was said, Jessica remained in her room. Now, as the heavy Jag rolled down Fifth Avenue, Jeffrey broke the silence. “Do you have plans after school?” he asked.
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