“No, thanks.” I shook a cigarette free from the pack I removed from my shirt pocket. “Quite a place you have here.”
“You like it?” He was obviously pleased, “Silvio ‘ll show you around afterward. Sit down.” He waved me to big armchair. Silvio took one across from me. Bonigli sat down behind the desk. We formed the three points of a triangle. “Well, man, you’ve really been stirrin’ up the animals,” he went on, his eyes half-closed against the wreath of cigar smoke. “I’ve had people callin’ me didn’t even know I was alive before you sprung the lid with Tony.”
I was relieved to notice he sounded jovial. “I didn’t know I was that important, Joe.”
He chuckled. “The types bouncin’ off me think so.”
“Types?”
“Well, there was the one who left me this.” Bonigli tossed something down on the desk top. I was too far away to reach for it from my chair. I got up and went over to the desk. As soon as I saw it was a picture, I think I knew what it was going to be before I turned it around to face me. It was the picture of Lynn taken at the filling station the night we’d made the break from Palladino’s. I don’t know what my face showed. I went back and sat down. “A businessman, the guy is,” Bonigli continued. He was watching my face. “He says.” He puffed on his cigar, seemingly having exhausted the subject.
“What’s his business with you?” I asked when the silence lengthened.
“The recovery of some missin’ property. His idea was I should reel you in for him.” Bonigli was grinning. “Funny thing, everyone seemed to have the idea if I told you to drop dead, you’d do it. You’d think I was somebody.”
I knew he was somebody. “As a businessman, he must have mentioned there was something in it for you, Joe?”
“Sure.” Bonigli said it easily. “Half of what was recovered with the papers held out for him.”
“Half of what was recovered? Half of what? A vial of uranium?”
“He said money.” Bonigli said it casually. Silence settled over the room.
So. Here was someone at last to whom the money wasn’t a dirty word. Notice it ranks second to the papers, though, Karma. “Hardly enough to interest you, Joe,” I said finally.
“Like?” he asked, removing his eyes from his cigar to focus them on me.
“Like twenty-eight thousand.”
He shrugged. “So maybe that’s big money to him. I figgered more from what he said, but that ain’t the point. the drill is we give him nothin’, an’ we sell him back these papers he’s so anxious to get his hands on.”
“Who is the guy, Joe?”
“His name? Marcum, or some such. Who cares, so long’s he produces? An’ don’t worry — you brought in the business, so you get to keep half the geld. On the price for the papers you get the usual.”
I forbore from reminding him that I already had all the geld. “The usual?”
“I keep forgettin’ you ain’t a reg’lar in the organization. Twenty percent.”
“And you don’t know anything about him?”
“What’s to know? I know where I can put my thumb on him.” Bonigli sounded injured. “I don’t let live ones run around loose without no string. He’s wit’ five or six more down at the San Marco, a family apartment hotel. They don’t show on the street much. Been here a week now. On the phone to me every day. Shows they’re hot after the merchandise.”
“What’s he look like? Big?”
“I ain’t seen him,” Bonogli said. “Silvio?”
“Not so big,” Silvio disagreed. “My size, maybe. A mustache. Some big ones in his lineup, though. Slow, careful talkers. Deliberate.”
“Broad, pale faces?”
“Give the man a box of Crackerjacks,” Silvio approved, and Bonigli laughed. “An’ if you want a guess, the mustache is a damn sight more used to givin’ orders than takin’ ’em. I’ll tell you the truth, I thought at first he was a crooked law, but somehow he ain’t the right shape for that.”
“You had other visitors?” I asked Bonigli.
“Yeah.” His hawk features broke into a hawk’s smile. “Risko sent a man over. He wanted you sacked up for the river. I asked him who he had to trade, startin’ with himself. He didn’t seem to care for the tone of the conversation.” Bonigli guffawed. He sobered immediately. “But that was for laughs. For real, I’ve had a guy from Washin’ton sniffing round every rathole in town I ever had anything to do with. I ain’t found out yet where he got the word. Shook me up till I checked it out he had no local contacts an’ didn’t seem to want none. When he found out he couldn’t get to me no other way, he called me after I set it up. He wants to see you real bad. When I saw the paper this mornin’ I knew you’d be along. I called this boy back an’ told him I’d set up a meetin’ for him.”
I half rose from the edge of my chair. “You did what?”
“Don’t go off half cocked. When he goes back to Washin’ton I don’t want him pickin’ up no phone to I.R.S. or someone like that ‘cause he thinks I spun him around here. I pay my taxes, see, but I can’t use no extra attention. All those damn outfits down there sleep together.”
“But what’s that got to do — ”
“So you do me the favor.” The injured note was back in Bonigli’s tone. “I’m puttin’ the lid on here for you, ain’t I? An I said I’d arrange it, didn’t I? He’ll be alone. You won’t. You just listen to him make his little speech an’ then you kiss him off. He thinks I done my best for him. He’s off my back.”
“But what does he want?”
“Oh, he wants the paper, too.” Bonigli laughed. “Ought to be a helluva payoff, the biddin’ you’ve stirred up. This boy’s an Honest John type, though. No payday. We’ll go the other way.”
“I don’t want to talk to him Joe. What have I got to say to him?”
“What the hell do I care what you say to him? Tell him to run up a tree an’ branch off. Tell him anything. Just do me the favor. Now tell me somethin’. What’s in these here papers everyone is in such a stew over?”
“I don’t know, Joe.” Bonigli raised an eyebrow don’t. They’re not in English.”
“Not in — oh, yeah, come to think of it Silvio said he looked like a furriner. Th’ one at the San Marco.”
Silvio nodded confirmation. “But why is Frutig interested then?” he asked.
“Frutig?”
“The government man,” Silvio said.
“Let’s find out,” Bonigli said. He reached for the phone on his desk.
“You mean right now? You’re going to bring him out here now?” I asked hurriedly before he could dial.
“Why not?”
“You’ve hit me fast with all this. I’d like time to think it over.”
Bonigli’s amber-colored eyes studied me. “What’s to think, man? We get rid of the government type with no hard feelin’s, make a cash deal with the crowd at the San Marco, get you to a climate where there’s less heat, an’ make a dollar or two en route. A nice package.” He studied me, his hand still on the phone. “You did come here lookin’ for an umbrella?”
“Well, partly.”
“So we’ll get to the rest later.” He picked up the receiver and dialed. “Mr. Robert Frutig.” He waited, his cigar cocked at a jaunty angle. “Frutig? This is Joe Bonigli. Yeah. That guy you wanted to see — I got him for you. If you still wanna talk to him.” He winked at me. “Okay, I’ll send a car for you. It hurt your feelin’s if you don’t see where you’re goin? Okay. An’ unnerstan’, I’m just actin’ as a clearin’ house in this. I don’t know from nothin’. Right? Right.” He replaced the phone. “Go pick him up at the Congress Hotel, Silvio. Use the paneled Caddie. I don’t want this boy findin’ his way back to the house here.”
“Joe — ” I began as Silvio left the library. It was time I got to the purpose of my visit.
“How about a drink while we’re waitin’?” Bonigli’s voice overrode mine. “Want you to see my bar, anyway. Three of every kind of liquor in the world.” He sa
id it with pride. “I only drink wine myself. Come on.” He led the way without bothering to see if I was following.
I trailed after him with misgivings.
Fifty percent of us seemed to feel I’d gone under new management.
And I wasn’t the fifty percent that thought it.
chapter X
Bonigli must have been a frustrated showman at heart, he took such delight in staging the meeting. I was established behind his desk in the library, alone. “Just let him know he ain’t gonna do no good with you,” he said to me before leaving. “Then maybe he’ll get tired of sniffin’ at every fireplug in this town.”
I didn’t say anything.
Frutig must have been given the full treatment on the way in; when he entered the library he was glancing around for still more mechanical marvels. He was the guy I’d clobbered on the ferry.
“You’re Karma?” he asked, advancing to the desk. I was surprised at how young he was, and I’d forgotten how big he was; I was damn lucky I’d landed the first lick on the ferry. He had a hard, capable-looking face.
“I’m Karma,” I said. I remembered he never had seen my face.
“Is this room bugged?” he demanded.
I shrugged. “I’m a stranger here myself.”
He moved out into the center of the room. “Let’s do our talking here.” It was all right with me. I moved out from behind the desk to join him. He was studying my face. “You don’t mind convincing me you’re Karma?”
“You mean I don’t look like my picture? Thanks. How’s the lump under your ear you got in the ferry hold over the back deck of my car?”
“So you’re Karma.” He tried to smile. He shook his head as though still disbelieving the memory. “That job on top of the one before it — if I’d been Japanese I’d have joined up with my ancestors already. I’m halfway expecting a hint from my boss it might be a good idea.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“Let’s call him Big Brother.” Frutig took out a pack of cigarettes, offered me one, and lipped one out of the package when I shook my head. “I’m on leave, officially,” he said. “Since you clocked me. I just thought I’d take a chance you’d show back here and see if I could get to feeling a little less like an idiot.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “Have you any idea what you tied into on the turnpike that night?”
“Lately I have.”
“So where do you stand?”
“That’s a damn fool question, Frutig.” I said heatedly. “Where the hell would you stand if you were me? As far as you’re concerned how do you think I can afford to be anything but a rat bastard?”
“How would you like to be a dead rat bastard?”
I stared at him. “What the hell do you mean?”
“I know I’m here under a flag of truce.” He waved his lighted cigarette in a semicircle to indicate his surroundings. “But the second I go out the door here the truce is off. And you haven’t got the picture, Karma. You haven’t even begun to get the picture. Sure, we’d like to recover the papers. But it’s a damn sight more important to us that nobody else recovers them. I’ll give it to you cold turkey: if we kill you, and the papers disappear, we’re ahead. And if you think I’m kidding about the first part of that, you don’t know the people who give me my orders. You’ll be hunted down, and I mean with guns. You don’t believe me?” I didn’t say anything. “I don’t understand you,” he continued. “We looked you up. You were in Korea as a volunteer. Where’s your patriotism now?”
“I could cite you the prison block and cell number.”
He jammed his big hands together, rubbing the knuckles forcibly, the cigarette bobbing in the corner of his hard-looking mouth as he spoke. “I’ll say it once more,” he said in an accent of strained patience. “Do it our way, or you’re dead. We made a move — an important move — and we got the brass ring but we didn’t get away with it. We ran into three times what we should have, based on past performances. My partner was knocked out and dragged off in a car. When he came to from the needle they gave him, he knew what he’d be up against when they got to wherever they were going. He grabbed the wheel of the car. Try it on for size, Karma.”
“You sound like you think I’m wearing a government horse collar, Frutig. What I’ve got my baby blues on is the preservation of Number One.”
“You sonofabitch, do you want me to get down on my knees and sing falsetto that this is bigger than both of us?” he barked. “Your luck can’t go on forever, you know. I just missed you in Detroit. After that we figured you for Chicago. We had roadblocks set up on the Indiana Toll Road. It was only an afterthought that three of us were sent up to cover the ferries.”
I seized the opportunity. “Did you just miss me at a filling station outside Jackson that night?”
“Jackson? No. No, I’m sure I’d have heard, and I didn’t. They were that close to you at that time?”
“I had to disable a car with three men in it who were taking pictures of mine.”
“They were away out of their territory,” Frutig said bitterly. “They didn’t dare make a move without a direct order, and at that point they evidently didn’t have it. We’ve never been able to figure why they’ve hung on the way they have, anyway. Naturally the top men don’t want to have to explain to Papa Bear they lost the pouch, but so far as they know nothing in it wasn’t replaceable. They don’t know about the stuff we’re interested in.”
And you don’t know about the money, I thought. No wonder you ran into heavier weather than you expected. With a healthy respect for the foibles of human nature in the vicinity of three-quarters of a million dollars, the other side had backstopped the briefcase man.
“Frutig, I’m in a spot where — ”
“I said we looked you up,” he interrupted me. “We checked into your case, too. You think it would do any good if it was reopened?”
“I think it could do a hell of a lot of good, if it was reopened in a different jurisdiction.”
“Suppose I put it in writing it would be?”
“You know better than that. I’ve burned too many bridges.”
He started toward the ashtray on the desk with his cigarette, changed his mind, and dropped it on the rich carpeting and crushed it under his heel. “Sure, the breakout was a tough crust to swallow,” he said. “A lot of people are still gagging over it.” He was watching my face. “But a solution could be managed.”
“What’s your middle name? God?”
His big hands clenched. “It had to be someone like you who found it. That’s your final answer?”
“You don’t see that it has to be?”
“No, I don’t.” His voice was cold. “Never mind whining to me about a world you never made, man. You’re an adult, presumably. And you said it yourself: you can’t come out of all this scot-free. But you can come out of it in better shape than you went into it. Or you can end up on a slab.” He turned away from me and walked to the library door. “I’ll be ready at the hotel,” he said over his shoulder.
I was back behind the desk when Bonigli and Silvio re-entered a good two minutes later. Two minutes isn’t a long time, but it’s long enough to do some thinking.
“We couldn’t hear it all too good after he moved you away from the desk,” Bonigli said, “but we could hear enough. I mean that’s one tough-talkin’ bastard, that one. I never heard no federal sound off like that.”
“He wants the papers,” I said.
“Wit’out payin’ for ’em,” Bonigli said. He sounded scandalized. “He’s nuts. Who does he think he’s scarin’?”
“Me,” I said.
“He can’t find you,” Bonigli emphasized. “He don’t know where he’s been, an’ he ain’t about to find out.”
“What I don’t get,” Silvio interjected in a thoughtful tone, “is what does it take for a federal to lay it on the line he’s gonna blast you?”
“This is a different kind of federal.”
“Ahh, he’s just makin’ chin musi
c,” Bonigli said. “An’ he better not let his foot slip in this town. Now when can you get the stuff so we can make a deal with the guy at the San Marco?”
“Oh — tomorrow.”
“Good. Where’s your girl?”
“Girl?”
Bonigli looked his impatience. “The one in the picture.”
“Down the road a piece. Joe, I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You can sleep here tonight,” Bonigli said. “Silvio ‘ll drive you tomorrow an’ you can bring your girl back with the stuff.”
Silvio should live that long. “You were going to have him show me around,” I said. “I’d like to see the rest of the place.”
“Sure,” Bonigli said agreeably. “Give him the grand tour, Silvio. I’m gonna hit the sack. You realize it’s after eleven? You boys want a sandwich, there’s always somethin’ in the kitchen. See you in the mornin’.”
I followed Silvio from the library, down the carpeted corridor. The minute I’d seen the garage setup, I’d kissed the Buick good-bye. If I was going to get out of this place, it wasn’t that way.
Silvio slowed down until I caught up to him. He appeared to be turning something over in his mind. “I still don’t get that guy,” he said, glancing at my face. “I can see him doin’ it, but to say it? This I never heard before.”
“He lost his partner. And his bosses keep telling him it’s important.”
“How the hell important can it get? I still never heard — ”
“What’s the reason for that overhang there?” I interrupted him, pointing at the door ahead of us.
“Oh, yeah.” Recalled to his duty, he tapped the solid frame of the corridor door at the end of the passage. “This looks like a door to outside, right? Only it ain’t. This here house is actually two houses. We’re in the back one. The library is in the back one. All the bedrooms are in the back. Up front it’s just an ordinary house that opens on another street. Back here it’s a little special. In between — ” he opened the door and I blinked at a solid sheet of steel blocking our progress “ — is a convincer for anyone with strongarm stuff in mind. Does anyone heave a pineapple at the front steps out there — ” he gestured beyond the door “ — nothin’ gets through to the rear.”
Strongarm (Prologue Crime) Page 13