Created, the Destroyer

by Warren Murphy

  “Life is what I make it.”

  “You should have been an Italian.”

  “You should have been a Jew.”

  “It’s the next best thing.” A warm smile crossed Viaselli’s face as he pondered the board. “What I never could understand was your fondness for Southerners.”

  “What fondness?”

  “Jimmy from Texas.”

  “Merely an employee.”

  “Merely? It never appeared like that to me.”

  “Appearances are deceiving.”

  “Appearances are all there is.”

  “I have your brother-in-law,” Felton said, anxious to end the philosophy.

  “Tony?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, that brings back the problem of the black queen and the black bishop. Should I destroy them?”

  “Yes,” Felton said, “but not when you’re outnumbered.”

  “Outnumbered?”

  “Just you, me and your man. You’re outnumbered,” Felton said, nodding to the conservatively dressed gentleman at the door.

  “And all my people in the living room?”

  “An evening’s entertainment for Jimmy.”

  “I don’t think so, but nevertheless, you are not the black queen and black bishop. You are my white queen, the most powerful piece on the board. For you to turn black would be disaster for me, considering that I am under attack.”

  “I am under attack too.”

  Viaselli looked up from the board and smiled.

  Felton placed a hand on the table. “Who are we fighting?”

  “I’m glad you said we, Norman.” Viaselli softly clapped his hands. “I’m glad, and yet I don’t know. A Senate committee is coming to our area, probably in two weeks. Yet we’ve been under surveillance now for five years. Does the Senate prepare that far in advance? No, I don’t think so. And the investigations have been different. You have noticed. With the FBI and the tax men, investigations would end up in court. But these five years of men snooping around have not ended up in court.”

  “You mentioned a Senate investigation?”

  “Yes. The Senate is working its way east across country and will be here soon. All of a sudden there have been more people snooping around.”

  “That accounts for the increase in targets in recent months.”

  “I think so. But there’s something else that’s strange. You are under attack?”

  Felton nodded. “Another family fight among you guineas?”

  Viaselli’s cheeks reddened, but he showed no other emotion. “No,” he said. “We have a new opponent. I do not know who or what he is. Do you?”

  “I may know in a couple of days.”

  “Good. I want to know too. Now you can return Tony.”

  “Maybe.”

  Carmine became silent. He had a way of silence that he could use more effectively than words. Felton knew that to reopen the conversation would give Carmine the edge. And all Carmine needed, despite Felton’s feeling about how much he did for the man and how much the man needed him, was for Felton to make the first move and he would be lost.

  It had been that way twenty years ago, only then Viaselli didn’t have his headquarters in the Royal Plaza Hotel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It was the back of a grocery store which Viaselli’s father ran for a living. Instead of the fancy carved ivory chess pieces, Viaselli was leaning over a wooden case on which were painted black and white squares. He was pondering the cheap wooden pieces when Felton entered.

  The summer-hatched flies dominated the room. Viaselli looked up.

  “Sit down,” he had said. “I want to talk about money.”

  Felton stood. “What does a second-rate numbers runner know about money?”

  Viaselli moved a pawn forward. “I know there’s a war on. I know there’s a lot to be had. I know you’re not getting much of it.”

  “I’m getting enough.”

  “Two grand a job on a contract basis? Is that enough for a smart Jewboy?”

  “It’s more than dumb guineas make.”

  Viaselli moved a bishop from the opposite side of the board.

  “Today, yes. Tomorrow?”

  “Alphonso isn’t going to let you make any more. Blood or not, he doesn’t trust you. I’ve heard.”

  “And if Alphonso is dead?”

  “Giacomo takes it.”

  “And if Giacomo is dead?”

  “Louis.”

  “And if Louis is dead?”

  Felton shrugged. “It would take a plague to kill that many.”

  “And if Louis is dead?” Viaselli moved a knight endangering the bishop he had brought out from the other side.

  Felton shrugged again. “You bring me here to pass the time of day?”

  “And if Louis is dead?” Viaselli repeated.

  “Someone else.”

  “Who else?”

  “Whoever has the balls.”

  “Flaherty. Would Flaherty take over?”

  “No, he’s not a wop.”

  “What am I?”

  “A wop, but it don’t mean you’re going to grab the whole works just because your name ends in an ‘I’.”

  Viaselli moved out another knight “It’s a good beginning,” he said. He looked up from the board again. “Look, what kind of a Jew are you, working for someone else all the time?”

  “You want me to work for you?”

  Viaselli moved his queen. It was one move to mate. He recited: “You kill Alphonso. You kill Giacomo. You kill Louis. Then…”

  “Then what?” Felton said.

  “Then who’s going to kill you?”

  “You.”

  “With what? You’ll be the only one around with artillery. The only one with any brains, anyway. The whole syndicate will be disorganized.”

  “Then why don’t I rub you out, and take over myself,” Felton asked.

  “Because you’re not a wop. Every Mafioso would be gunning for you. They don’t trust any but their own. You’d be a danger.”

  “And you wouldn’t?”

  “I’m one of their own. They’ll learn to live with me. Particularly if I can get things going again.”

  He looked long and hard at Felton. “What’s your future now? Two guineas fight and you wind up dying for the money. A couple of lousy grand. Is that any way for a Jew to die?”

  “Dead is dead.”

  “But you can live. And on top of the pile.”

  “And you don’t double-cross me?”

  “You’ll be my queen. My most powerful piece. Double-cross my queen?”

  “How about your torpedoes?”

  “I won’t have any.”

  “The ones you inherit.”

  “I send them away, Chicago, Frisco, New Orleans. You will be my army. The only way to make this business pay, without trouble, is to separate the money makers from the troublemakers. No one who works for me will carry a gun. You’ll do all that work. You get paid, not by the job, but by salary and a percentage of the take. Get rid of Alphonso, Giacomo and Louis, and you’ll start off with one million dollars.”

  “I wish I understood chess.”

  “You could be a master,” Viaselli said.

  But Felton didn’t have time for chess. From the East Side, he rounded up Moesher, the kid who would stand all day and fire pistols at targets. Angelo Scottichio he found at a bar, planning a cheap heist that would earn him less than one hundred dollars. Timothy O’Hara came off the docks where he specialized in petty larceny of Army equipment. Jimmy Roberts was a cowboy out on his luck, with a big Texas mouth that found him with gun in hand listening to a heavyset young man who had just hired him as a killer.

  “You will be my generals,” Felton told the four. “As long as we operate like a military machine, we will survive and win and get rich. Real rich.”

  “We can also get killed,” grumbled Moesher.

  “Only until we get rid of those who’ve got the muscle to kill us.”
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  The first hit was Alphonso Degenerato, head of the Bronx rackets who chose to live in an unassailable Long Island mansion. But he was not in his mansion when a hired torpedo named Norman Felton approached him with four other men.

  Alphonso was in bed with a chorus girl in her upper East Side apartment overlooking the East River. He knew he was safe because only his nephew, Carmine Viaselli, knew where he was. He would have found the East River quite cold had it not been for the lead sedative administered by the five young men and the warming company of the lovely and quite-dead chorus girl.

  Giacomo Gianinni was a quiet man who never toyed with chorines. He was strictly business. On the good recommendation of Carmine Viaselli, the grieving nephew of Alphonso, he met secretly with a torpedo to plan the revenge of Alphonso. He met the young torpedo on a penthouse roof. The torpedo brought four other men with him, all of whom tried desperately to stop Giacomo from jumping off the roof.

  And then Felton received a phone call from Viaselli. “They know it’s you, Norman,” he said.

  “Then they’re sure as hell going to know it’s you, too, booby.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Viaselli said. “There’s only Louis left. But he expects you. No surprises this time. But one thing. Make the body disappear.”

  “Why?”

  “Then I have bargaining power. My people are susceptible to mysteries.”

  Louis lived on a yacht and never left it. He had telephone connections and speedboats to carry his orders out and his money in.

  To Felton, it was impossible. He was just waiting to be killed, just waiting for Louis to muster the torpedoes to do the job. Then Louis made a mistake. He quietly tied up his yacht on the shores of the Hackensack River in Jersey City, near an auto junkyard.

  It was World War II. Junk, steel, metal were in demand. Louis docked his yacht and within fifty-five minutes Felton had paid four times what the yard and its junk-processing machinery was worth. It was every cent he could round up. But what good is money without life?

  It was a very simple plan when the former junkyard owner explained how the machine worked. And when Felton saw the machine, he laughed and laughed.

  “Gentlemen,” he told his four generals, “our future is made.”

  That night, the yacht’s hull was ripped open by some kind of missile. The next day, over a bullhorn, Jimmy called to the yacht to see if they wanted the hull repaired.

  “We can’t leave the vessel,” came the answer.

  “You don’t have to leave. We’ll tow you ashore and fix you while you’re docked.”

  After ten minutes, the men on the yacht agreed.

  Junkyard cranes were moved into position. Heavy steel cables were fastened to the front and rear of the ship. The cranes began to hoist and tug. They jerked the yacht up a water-slicked mud runway to the top of an incline, which suddenly spilled downhill into a large concrete block house, reinforced with slabs of steel. The yacht and its crew slid into the block house and never came out.

  The next day, Felton received another call from Viaselli. “Magnificent. Did I tell you one million dollars? Make it two million dollars. How did you do it? The crew, the yacht and everything.”

  “I don’t waste all my time on chess,” Felton answered. The next few years were easy. Moesher, the crack shot, did most of the work, eliminating witnesses against Viaselli. Their bodies vanished.

  O’Hara kept recruiting, kept tabs on all the young torpedoes trying to develop within Viaselli’s mob. He’d hire them once, then eliminate them. Scottichio built a minor empire in Philadelphia, again under Felton’s control.

  Jimmy rumbled along following his boss’s orders. It was a lot safer than riding brahma bulls. Felton had been able to keep clean. His name came up in no investigations; he kept out of the front line of action; he built a life of respectability.

  Only his four men knew anything about Felton’s operation. And they would not talk. The mystery kept them all on top of the heap.

  It had been a profitable deal for all. And now Felton stared at Viaselli pondering fancy chess pieces in the Royal Plaza Hotel, and he wondered how long the profits would last.

  “You’re still my white queen, Norman,” Viaselli said, resting his hands on the long mahogany table. “There is no one else.”

  “That’s nice,” Felton said, watching Viaselli make the final move to mate. “Then, who is Maxwell?”

  Viaselli looked up quizzically. “Maxwell?”

  Felton nodded. “Whoever is going for us has something to do with a Maxwell. I killed a man this afternoon whose only interest was this Maxwell.”

  “Maxwell?” Viaselli stared in puzzlement at the board. Were new pieces entering the game?

  “Maxwell?” Felton repeated.

  Viaselli shrugged. Felton cocked an eyebrow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was easy to get into a room alone with a Briarcliff student, much easier than sneaking into a brothel. Not that Remo had ever sneaked into a brothel. It was just that madames were much shrewder than deans of women. They had to be. They were dealing with more complicated things than the intellectual development of a new generation of women.

  Remo merely told the Dean of Women that he was writing an article for a magazine dedicated to the metaphysics of the mind. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but the dean, a heavyset, cow-like matron with a strong nose and a hairy chin, agreed to give him the run of the campus until eleven p.m., when, of course, propriety dictated a women’s campus should be free of men. At that time, the dean of women said, gently caressing a pencil, Remo could report to her in her quarters and she would help him review the notes for the article.

  Thus, Remo found himself in Fayerweather Hall, scribbling notes he would never need on a cheap steno pad he intended to throw away, as a dozen young, obnoxious, loud, enthusiastic young women shouted their opinions on “What is Woman’s Relation to the Cosmos?”

  They all had opinions. They all crowded the couch on which Remo sat. Hands, smiles, voices assaulted him. And each girl, he asked the same question: “And your name?” And each time, he didn’t get the answer he wanted. Finally, he said, “Are there any more girls in this dorm?”

  They shook their heads. Then one said, “Not unless you count Cinthy.”

  Remo perked up. “Cinthy? Cinthy who?”

  “Cinthy Felton.” The girl laughed. “The curve-breaker, the grind.”

  “That’s not nice,” said another student.

  “Well, it’s true,” the other said defensively.

  “And she’s where?” Remo asked.

  “In her room, where else?”

  “I think her opinion is worth hearing, too. If you’ll excuse me, girls. What’s her room?”

  “Second floor, first right,” a chorus responded. “But you can’t go up. Rules.”

  Remo smiled politely. “But I have permission. Thank you.”

  He mounted the steps, polished with a half-century of shine, rubbed by thousands of feet of wives of presidents and ambassadors, glowing in a dusky half-light from cheap old lamps. You could bottle the tradition surrounding Fayerweather Hall, it was that strong.

  It was a smell, a feeling. Traditions? Remo smiled. Someone had to start somewhere, had to start a tradition somehow, and if enough years passed between the original stupidity and its ultimate worthlessness, that, sir, was tradition. Where had he heard that definition of tradition? Had he made it up?

  The first door on the right was open. He saw a desk, a light splashing on it, and a rather coarse leg sticking from beneath it. An arm, at the end of which were five stubby nail-bitten fingers, moved from behind the high-shelf portion of the desk which concealed its user.

  “Hello,” Remo said. “I’m doing a magazine article.” It was a hell of an introduction to a woman he would have to convince to take him home to daddy.

  “What are you doing here?” Her voice was a composite of adolescent squeak and matron rasp.

  “I’m writing an article.
”

  “Oh.”

  She pushed her chair over so she could see Remo. What she saw was a big, handsome man silhouetted in the doorway. He saw another of the generation of moral crusaders: a girl with a blue skirt and a brown sweater, wearing white tennis shoes. Her face was pleasant, or could have been pleasant if she had worn makeup. But she wore none. Her hair was wildly frizzled, like a wheat field in the wind. She chewed on the point of her pencil. On her sweater was a button, “Freedom Now.”

  “I’m interviewing students.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I’d like to interview you.”

  “Yes.”

  Remo fidgeted. His feet somehow needed shuffling. He attempted to concentrate on her essence, to project his manhood as Chiun had taught, but somehow his mind was up against something not quite a woman. She had breasts, hips, eyes, mouth, ears, nose, but the essence of woman, womanliness, had somehow been bled out of her.

  “May I interview you?”

  “Certainly. Sit down on the bed.” Coming from any other woman, this might have had the overtones of invitation. Coming from the girl before him, it was a logical suggestion to sit down on the bed because there was only one chair in the room and she was in it.

  “What’s your name?” Remo asked, displaying the pad.

  “Cynthia Felton.”

  “Age?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Home?”

  “East Hudson, New Jersey. A gritty town, but Daddy likes it. Sit down.”

  “Oh, yes,” Remo said, lowering himself to a bluish blanket. “And let’s see, what do you think is the woman’s relation to the cosmos?”

  “Metaphysically?”

  “Of course.”

  “Essentially woman is the child bearer in an anthropoidal society, bounded on one hand by the society per se, that is empirically correct, rather to say…are you taking all this down?”

  “Of course, of course,” Remo said increasing the pace of his scribbling to keep up with the incomprehensible academic imbecilities of his subject. At the end of the interview, he conceded he did not understand all that he had been told, but would like a further explanation of some of the finer points.

  Cynthia was sorry, but she had a full day the next day.

  The writer pleaded that only she could help unravel this metaphysical knot.