The French Connection

by Robin Moore

  "This is Egan. What's happening?"

  "They're all running around like crazy, trying to salvage something," the communicator answered.

  "The Frenchmen?"

  "Dry. Not a thing."

  "Where is everybody? Still up around East End?"

  "Yes. They've set up temporary headquarters at that garage. Where are you? Luis Gonzalez called, and then he called back, saying . . . "

  "Patsy took off. I couldn't wait for Louie. I'm sitting on old man Fuca's house on Seventh Street in Brooklyn. I need help. I think Patsy just moved the goods in the house. Get some guys out here! And listen, you got a number up there? I wanna talk to Vinnie Hawkes."

  No one had stirred outside the Fuca house. Egan dialled the number for the garage at No. 45 East End Avenue. He briefed Lieutenant Hawkes, urging his boss to expedite reinforcements. He also begged that someone bring him a portable radio set. Then he asked:

  "How's Sonny doing, and Waters?"

  "I'm afraid I might have to lock them in cages,"

  Hawkes said dryly. "They're fighting like a pair of cats over who's responsible for calling the hit on the Frenchmen."

  "Tell them not to scratch each other's eyes out. Popeye will save their skins yet."

  "You watch out for your own skin."

  Egan walked back to his car. It was quarter past twelve. Rays of pale sun were trying to force through the layers of moody gray above. Seventh Street was quiet; there were few pedestrians on the quiet block.

  Egan sat in the right front seat of the Corvair, chin resting on his left forearm on the back of the seat, looking behind at No. 245 and the small blue Oldsmobile at the curb. The fingers of his right hand played with the holster snap of the .38 Police Special at his hip.

  A number of vehicles came through the block from Third Avenue in the next twenty-five minutes, but at twelve-forty Egan sensed something different about one car now crawling past the Fuca house. It held Detective Dick Auletta and Agent Artie Fluhr. Egan grinned, leaned across to the driver's side, and playfully flattened his nose against the window, goggling at them like a clown. Auletta noticed him as they came up alongside and smiled broadly. Fluhr stopped the car next to the Corvair, but Egan motioned them to keep going farther up the street. He got out and walked along the sidewalk after them, glancing back toward No. 245 every few strides.

  Fluhr had nosed in near the corner. As Egan climbed in the back and flopped down with a grunt, Auletta greeted him:

  "Well, has the little man had a trying day?"

  "Don't ask," Egan wheezed. "What a mess, huh? You know about my radio crapping out? Christ!"

  "Your worries are over," Fluhr smiled. "We brought you another portable unit."

  "Beautiful!" Egan twisted around to gaze a long second out the rear window. Turning back to the others, he said: "I wouldn't say our problems are necessarily over, though." And he filled them in on his observations and suspicions.

  "So what's the play?" Auletta asked. "Do we go for the collar now?"

  "I been thinking about that," said Egan. "And I think I'd rather wait until Patsy comes out again. I want to see if he still has that suitcase with him. If he does, we'll have to split up and you guys tail him. If he comes out clean, we hit. I'd sure like to have some guys around in any case. You never know what can go wrong."

  "Hold it!" Fluhr warned, eyes focused back on 7th Street. "Patsy and Barbara, they're coming out." The three officers, hunched low, watching carefully as the couple got in either side of the Olds. Patsy did not have the blue valise with him.

  "Boy, you guys got here just in time!" Egan exclaimed. "Look, Artie, we'll let them pass by here, then you two go get them. I'll run back to the house. I've got to get the warrants out of my car first. Give me that radio, in case we have to talk."

  Fluhr handed over the flat, gray rectangular walkie-talkie. They all ducked down out of sight as Patsy's blue compact approached and rolled by to the corner.

  Egan waited until the Olds turned right on Fourth Avenue before he clambered out and broke into a sprint back to his own car. Behind him, Fluhr's tires screeched as he and Auletta swept around the corner after the Fucas. The detective fumbled with his keys, opened the glove compartment and began to sort through the wrinkled sheaf of documents stuffed inside. He snorted impatiently and crammed the entire pile inside his jacket. Radiophone under one arm and his .38 in hand, Egan marched across the street to No. 245.

  C h a p t e r 1 7

  Joseph Fuca answered Egan's ring. He was a short, scowling old man with untidy gray-white hair and a day's growth of beard, wearing a soiled white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. "Yeah?" he glowered suspiciously at the burly redhead at the door.

  With his free hand, Egan flipped open his shield case. "Police officer. I have a warrant to search this house. You are Joseph Fuca?"

  "Policeman? Whatta you wanta? I no — " Fuca's mouth hung open and he blanched as he noticed the revolver in Egan's other fist.

  "Just take it nice and easy and we'll get along fine,"

  Egan said evenly, shouldering through the doorway into a small foyer, "Now, you're Joe Fuca, right?"

  The man was still staring at the gun. "Who else is here?" the detective inquired.

  Fuca only shook his head dumbly. "Okay." Egan shoved the .38 back into its holster under his leather jacket. "That better?"

  He looked the little man over again. His shapeless gray trousers were splotched with old paint, and there also seemed to be traces of a white dust of some kind.

  His scuffed brown shoes were covered with a powder also. "Okay, old man," he commanded, "let's go inside."

  "I no got nutting you want," Fuca protested.

  "Whatta you come — ?"

  "Fluhr here," a tinny voice echoed out of Egan's armpit. Fuca jumped, startled.

  Grinning, the detective brought the transmitter to his mouth. "You got them?"

  "We got them."

  "Any trouble?"

  "Negative."

  "Bring them back, kay."

  "Ten-four."

  Pushing Fuca before him, Egan made his way into the front parlour. The furniture was old-fashioned, mostly stuffed and much of it threadbare; faded white doilies masked arms and headrests and the floor was covered with worn green linoleum. The place looked reasonably tidy, but somehow there was a fetid atmosphere of uncleanliness. Egan could smell the unmistakable, slightly stale aroma of Italian spices.

  "Where's your wife?" he asked.

  "She's out."

  "Too bad. We're going to have visitors — your boy Patsy and his wife."

  "Whatta you mean, they justa left." Now the old man glared at Egan. "Why you maka this business? I gotta nutting here!"

  "You got somethin' here all right," Egan snapped.

  "And in a few minutes we're gonna find it — and mister, you're going to have real trouble."

  The doorbell rang. "Stay here!" the detective ordered. He went to the door. Standing outside were Detective Jim Hurley and Agent Jack Ripa. "Hey, gang!" Egan welcomed them. "Come on in. We're about to have a party."

  "We heard on the radio," Hurley said. "Any other guys show yet?"

  "Not yet."

  "Well, there's more coming. You think this is the drop?"

  "I think so," Egan said, "but we'll soon find out.

  Start looking around." As he stood aside in the doorway to let the two officers in, another car drew up outside. It was Fluhr and Auletta with their captives.

  "Well," Egan exclaimed, "here's our prize package!"

  A very sullen Patsy crossed the sidewalk ahead of Barbara and Auletta, then Fluhr followed behind them. The man whom Egan and his partners had been shadowing for months, whose every move had been watched and studied and analyzed and often worried about, somehow appeared slighter to the detective now, less menacing. Patsy's eyes were downcast yet wary. He moved like a trapped animal which fears the finish is near but which still may make one last clawing attempt at freedom should an opening present i
tself.

  Egan propelled Patsy into the parlour, trailed by Barbara, chewing gum, wearing her gaudy blonde wig.

  Then as Auletta and Fluhr entered, two more cars double-parked on 7th Street and four more detectives joined them. They began to examine the house.

  Egan confronted Patsy head-on: "Okay, you can make it easy all around if you tell us right off where the stuff is."

  "What stuff?" Patsy snarled. "What the hell is going on here? You better have — !"

  Egan brandished his fistful of official documents.

  "We got warrants for you and practically every place you been the past three months. You, your wife, your house, your two cars, your store, the Travatos, their car, your brother Tony and his house and his car, this joint, your father and mother — " he paused, pleased to note that Patsy had visibly paled, his eyes blinking in obvious surprise — "even your French friends back in New York!"

  Patsy was unable to speak for a moment. He shook his head, and looked up. "What French friends? I don't know no French — except Denise Darcel . . . "

  "Yeah? Well, then you don't care that they have all been arrested — right after you left them today."

  "I don't even know what you're talking about." He was going to try to brazen it through. "What do you want from me?"

  "You got a load of junk stashed in this house," accused Egan, aware that he himself was partly bluffing, for he could not be sure that Patsy had not really disposed of the heroin elsewhere and the suitcase he had brought into his parents' house was not clean.

  "What's junk?" Patsy asked with the eyes of an altar boy.

  Egan, fists on hips, legs planted apart, studied the shorter man with undisguised contempt, his gaze deliberately picking Patsy apart from his face down to his feet. The shoes bore a film of whitish powder, like his father's. The detective glanced over at the elder Fuca's shoes again, then, looking up at Patsy, he snapped to the old man: "Okay, Pop, which way to the cellar?" The minute flicker he saw in Patsy's eyes might have been one of apprehension.

  Joe Fuca was clearly reluctant, but he showed them to a door in the narrow corridor connecting the parlour with the rear of the apartment. "Open it," commanded Egan. It was dark below. "Lights!"

  Fuca flipped a switch just inside the door. Egan looked down. At the foot of the stairs, lying open on the cement floor, was a blue suitcase. He looked around at the old man and then to the son, a smile beginning to show on his mouth. "If we have to, we'll rip this place apart until we find what we're looking for." Patsy's face was expressionless. His father just glared. "No? Okay. Keep them up here," he told Auletta and the other officers, as he disappeared down the wooden steps.

  For a basement, the area below was about as neat as the parlour upstairs. It was a narrow rectangle, extending from the street side of the house to the rear. There was the outside door at the front end and two boarded-up windows. Two other small windows high in the rear wall opened on a backyard. At that end, the basement was separated by wood-plank partitions into three compartments, like large bins, apparently for storage use. In one corner, by a yellowed washtub, were an electric washing machine and a dryer, in another corner a blackened boiler and water heater. Overhead were the usual grimy pipes and asbestos-covered hot water ducts. The floor was chipped in spots, but it was swept very clean — a little unusual for even a tidy basement, Egan thought.

  He knelt by the open valise. It was empty, but in the corners he noticed filmy traces of a white powdery substance. He explored it with his forefinger, then placed the tip of his finger on his tongue. The taste was acidly bitter. One test of heroin. Grinning, Egan looked up the stairs to Patsy, standing on the top step, Dick Auletta at his shoulder.

  "Right here there's enough shit to put you away. With your record, you oughta get ten years. But I'll tell you what: for you, I'm gonna go for triple that! Put the cuffs on him, Dick."

  As he looked up from his crouched position,

  Egan's attention was caught by a cluster of large dark stains in the faded plaster ceiling over the stairs. He rose and stood on the bottom step and felt gingerly at one of the spots. It was damp, as though recently re-plastered. There were four such spots, of varying sizes, one more than a foot across. Then, behind the stairs and almost directly below them, for the first time he noticed that all four jets of an ancient gas stove were burning — as though to speed the drying of fresh plaster.

  "Well, well!" Egan grinned up again at Patsy, whose expression now was sagging. The detective went over to one of the storage bins in the rear and found an empty wooden crate, and he brought it back to the stove and climbed up onto it. Carefully, he probed one of the wet spots with his fingers, pushing up into the mushy plaster. Now, having tugged his sleeve back from the wrist, he shoved his hand all the way through. His fingers closed around a smooth, lumpy package. It was a plastic- wrapped bag, about the size and shape of a long bag of rice, but filled with white powder. It weighed about a pound — half a kilo of heroin!

  "Dick," he called up to Auletta. "You got a field tester?"

  "Artie's got plenty."

  "Tell him to come down. I think we struck gold!"

  Fluhr clattered down the stairs. He whistled when he saw the bundle in Egan's hand. "Look at that! "

  "Let's give it the treatment."

  Fluhr produced a small tin, like a pillbox, and extracted a tiny glass vial containing a clear liquid. He snapped off the top and handed it to Egan. The vial contained a few drops of sulfuric acid and formalde-hyde, called a Marquis reagent after the chemist who had developed the test for opium derivatives. Contact with any opium derivative would cause the liquid to turn a purplish colour, the depth of shade depending upon the strength, or "purity," of the narcotic sample.

  Egan dipped his fingers into the package just taken from the ceiling. He rubbed some of the white powder into the test tube. Almost instantly, the mixture became a deep purple.

  "Good Christ!" the Federal agent gasped. "Have you ever seen such a reaction?"

  "Never," Egan murmured in awe. "This has got to be the purest stuff anybody's ever seen around here!"

  A sullen Patsy Fuca and his wife Barbara, concealing her nervousness by furiously chomping her gum and snapping profane remarks at the officers, were led by Agent Bill Bailey and Detective Dick Auletta to Bailey's car and driven back to 67th Street for a search of their house.

  Eddie Egan skipped exuberantly up the rickety steps from the basement to the kitchen, where old Joe Fuca was being interrogated by Detectives Jim Hurley and Jimmy Gildea. Fuca was sitting at the kitchen table steadily working a bottle of whiskey, as the detectives tried to make him tell all he knew about the contents of the blue suitcase. Egan tossed two plastic bags each containing half a kilo of heroin on the table in front of Fuca. "Nothing in the house, huh, Joe?"

  Fuca stared at the bags and cried: "Thatsa dynamite. Pasquale tell me that is dynamite."

  With a disdainful snort, Egan turned to the telephone on the kitchen wall and dialled the number of the police temporary headquarters in the office of the garage back in Manhattan. Sergeant Jack Fleming answered.

  "I'm at Fuca's on 7th Street in Brooklyn. I've got a kilo and the shit's still comin' out of the ceiling. Call Chief Carey and ask him to call me here."

  Egan read off the Fuca number and told Fleming to have Carey ring twice and hang up, then once and hang up. Egan went back to the basement. He dug into the ceiling, removing one bag of heroin after another. Then, to his surprise, his searching fingers felt cold metal. He pulled out a submachine gun.

  "Hey, Joe," he shouted up the stairs, "you got a blueprint for this joint? There won't be any ceilings and walls left when we get through down here."

  The telephone in the kitchen rang twice, was silent, rang once, was silent again, then began to ring again. Egan stamped up the steps, hugging the half-kilo bags to him. He threw them down on the table and jerked the phone from the hook: "Popeye here."

  "What have you got there, Eddie?"

  "Si
x kilos and a machine gun and still counting."

  Chief Carey whistled. "Six kilos? Could there be more?"

  "Could be forty-six. We'll need a lot of men over here with axes and crowbars."

  "I'll be there myself," Carey answered.

  "Yes, sir." Egan hung up and turned to Fuca and his two inquisitors. "The big man himself is coming over. Better sober Joe up." Egan's beefy hand stabbed across the table, snatching the bottle of whiskey.

  Fuca screamed in rage: "Giva my drink!" Fuca's eyes blazed as he shambled to his feet. "You lousy, dirty bastid cop! Bust up my house!" The old man made a clumsy lunge at Egan, trying to strike his face. Egan, with a short, sharp jab to the jaw, sent him sprawling back across the table. Fuca stumbled to the floor and lay still, spittle spewing from his mouth as he breathed heavily.

  Sonny Grosso and Frank Waters were standing morosely in the lobby of the Hotel Commodore adjacent to Grand Central Station. Having made the impulsive move to stop the Frenchmen, under stress that perhaps overrode both their better judgments, only to find nothing substantially incriminating, both were acutely embarrassed and well aware that their precipitousness would probably lead to harassment of the bureau from officials all the way up to the U.S. Department of State.

  François Scaglia and Jacques Angelvin continued to protest ignorance of any wrongdoing and were still waiting in detainment at the garage for the French interpreter. Agent Martin F. Pera had obligingly lost his way twice and still hadn't arrived at No. 45 East End Avenue.

  The only items of interest found on either Barbier, Scaglia or Angelvin were two hotel room receipts in the pocket of the television performer, who seemed to be near tears as he proclaimed that this could only be a misunderstanding. One of the receipts was for a room at the Waldorf-Astoria; the faded carbon showed the arrival date to be January 10, 1962. The other, less crumpled and plainer, was from the Commodore, and the check-in date was January 17, 1962, just the day before.

  After the arrest, Sonny and Waters had driven down to the Waldorf, where they confirmed that Angelvin had stayed for several days. He had kept his auto in the hotel garage, and he had checked out Wednesday morning, settling his bill in cash. The detectives then went to the Commodore. An assistant manager let them into Angelvin's room, a low-priced, unadorned bedroom which was crowded with twin beds. The Frenchman had unpacked only a few of his clothes and his toiletries. There was some correspondence from Radio Television Française and from a TV production firm in New York; a mildly affectionate note from a woman named Lilli DeBecque; several tourist folders and a map of the city; a copy of a short letter Angelvin had written to the U.S. Lines about his planned return voyage to Le Havre aboard the America, and a ticket for his passage.