She tasted herself in his mouth, the taste completing the joining and sharing. She had tasted his flesh many times, and the commingling with her own juices was a rare gift. She had taken his semen in her mouth, and then carefully moistened his face, his lips, his mouth with his own essence. He had told her no woman had ever done that to him, and when he asked if she had done this to any other man, she had put her finger over her own lips. No questions, no answers.
She had known, of course, of his visit to Papa Ventura, and of his plans to rent a house in Queens for a short period of time. They had never been together in New York. It was a mutual decision made without explanation, but in accord.
He propped his head on his hand, elbow resting alongside her. His tongue flicked to the corners of his mouth and he spoke to her softly.
“How did the boy look? How did he seem to you?”
“Ugly as ever.”
“And stupid, right? So stupid a boy, who ever would want to know him?”
It was a game they played. He had told her of his amah’s superstition: If you praise a child too much, an evil spirit might overhear you and become jealous and steal the child for himself.
In a conspiratorial whisper, breathy into his ear, she said, “My God, he is magnificent. So much like you.”
“I see
you
in him. It’s interesting that you cannot.”
She thought of the boy’s face: the cheekbones, the shape of his mouth; the way he held his head at certain moments. Yes. She nodded; there was something of herself.
“When he’s in school in London,” Dennis said, “you can stay in the apartment whenever you visit. He can stay with you for holidays.”
“When will he go to London?”
“When the fall term begins. This summer I want to take him sailing.” He gestured broadly. It was a world large with possibility. He studied Laura carefully, caught a quick expression. She was withdrawing from him into some secret sad place of her own. He reached for her face, turned her chin up. “What?” When she pulled her face away, he insisted. “Tell me.”
“Does he know who I am?”
Dennis Chen moved away abruptly. They had had this discussion before. He stood up, wrapped himself in a long, dark, red silk robe, knotted the belt around his narrow waist.
She did not repeat the question, but she didn’t take her eyes from him.
Finally, in a cold voice, he said, “You are his auntie. He loves you very much.
That is it.”
She had agreed to all of his terms at the very beginning. She had at first wanted to have an abortion but he had wanted her to have a child for him. And if it was a boy, the child would be part of his life. In return, she could visit with him, love him, be “related” to him in some unclear way.
Laura hadn’t meant to bring this up again. She had made the deal; she would abide by it. But she hadn’t known how much she would love the child. Realistically, she knew there was nothing she could do about the way things were. She also knew he could close her out completely.
She did nothing to hide her bitterness. She shrugged slightly, more angry at herself than at him.
When she finished showering, he wrapped her in a large, thick towel. “Laura—”
“What?”
Not wanting to say it, but saying it anyway, Dennis Chen asked her, “Is this … all of this … just for the boy? Or—”
Laura stiffened. She smacked his hand away and glared at him. Her voice was deadly. “Do you think for one single moment of thought that I would come here as some kind of whore, as part of some agreement, that I would barter my body for …”
He put his hands on either side of her face, smoothed the short clean strands back so her face was naked in its anger.
“Forgive me.”
He should have known better. Laura did only what she wanted to do. Nothing could force her into the kind of giving, the kind of sharing, they had between them.
Not even the boy. He was sure of that.
He was practically sure of that.
N
ICK WAS IMPRESSED BY
the extent of his grandfather’s industrial holdings. Other families went into the controlling of nearly every vital activity the city needs to run efficiently, services the average citizen took for granted—private garbage pickup, laundry services—hotels and restaurants and hospitals could not function without the services of the union members. The families controlled the fish industry, the meat industry. Won million-dollar contracts for building city-owned projects—even if their bid wasn’t necessarily the lowest. There are always unanticipated cost overruns, after all.
Nicholas Ventura, of course, extracted a certain percentage of all such enterprises as his family’s rightful share. But personally, with his own assets—and through the assets of his organization—he also owned a network of large storage buildings; small factories; car repair shops; hard use places; yards where scrap iron was stored, automobiles were crushed. Ventura Enterprises held leases on a tremendous number of neighborhood mom-and-pop stores; family restaurants, Italian and Chinese, Japanese and Thai. In some areas of Queens and Brooklyn, every Korean fruit and vegetable store was rented through Ventura, the owner. Every butcher shop, fish market, soft ice cream and yogurt stand; every bowling alley. No space, of any kind, was rented without certain upfront understandings: where the produce would be purchased, how delivered, where and how sold. There was a checklist of more than a hundred rented stores, some large ones situated in malls, some small stores in residential neighborhoods that used various Ventura storehouses for their merchandise, whether imported or not. Strewn about the five boroughs of New York City, as well as towns and villages in Nassau and Suffolk County, Long Island, were a large number of Ventura Enterprises, not necessarily identifiable by the specific name. Wherever there was money to be made, Papa Ventura held a lease. And a cut.
Locations for the dispersal of the China White, the purest heroin ever imported into the country, were ready. The Far Eastern network of suppliers and dealers was firmly in place in the West Coast: San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego; into Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago. South to Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans. Atlantic City and now the New York area. The Chinese Triads that controlled the stuff could now view the Red China takeover of Hong Kong as little more than a nuisance. Taiwan served as a major player in the drug trade: as had the Generalissimo in the good old days of cooperation between the Triads and all their criminal activities and the ousted leader and his defeated army. The Triads were powerful enough to have worked successfully with the Japanese invaders during the war. To everyone’s advantage. They would eventually make their deals with the Reds.
The changing ethnic population in areas of Queens gave rise to many shops selling imported Asian furnishings, carpets, pillows, artifacts, herbs, vegetables, concoctions for every need. These stores had come into being within the last three or four years, as Italians, Greeks, and Irish moved out and Pakistanis, Chinese, Koreans, and others too exotic to be easily identified moved in. Whatever their background, from wherever they came, these merchandisers understood the protocol and accepted it as the price of doing business.
Nick and his grandfather dined together in a popular Italian restaurant in Nassau County, known for its fresh fish and northern-style cooking. The maître d’ was a smooth-smiling guy about Nick’s age, introduced to him as Charlie Napolitano’s son, Little Charlie. He brought Nick to meet the cook, a cousin, who had worked his way from his own small Canarsie restaurant to run the large, spotless, modern kitchen that he delighted in showing to Nick.
“Cookie” Nostriana told Nick, “You be sure you come back here before you leave, I give you a little something to take home with you.”
The little something was enough food for a four-course dinner for six. Nick regretted he had no one to share the meal with. For the first time in a long while, the bright, snub-nosed face of redheaded Eddie Manganaro flashed in his brain. That was one guy with a hollow leg for good Italian food. But he couldn’t reach back. Not to Eddie; not to anyone. He hadn’t spoken to his uncle Frank in weeks. He was sticking to the rules laid out for him.
Papa Ventura told him only what he wanted Nick to know, and what seemed important to Papa was that Nick understand that the Ventura family would not deal directly with drugs. Others would handle the delivery, dispersal, and monies involved in the multi-billion-dollar business. Within the boundaries of his influence, the Venturas would collect vast sums of money, though not from the actual handling of the Chinese heroin. They would merely make available, for a price, locations: storehouses, retail stores, business locations, apartments, houses, junkyards—whatever they were asked. What the customer did or did not do was their own concern—as long as they paid Papa Ventura’s people a sum of money for the privately run businesses in which they dealt. The fact that many Chinese businesses rented large executive office space in the forty-story buildings along Queens Boulevard, for what to all intents and purposes was legitimate activity, was all to the good. Many apparently stand-up businesses were financed by drug money, laundered and scrubbed, so sanitized and profitable that no one could possibly compete.
Factories that paid desperately small amounts of money to desperately poor illegal immigrants, whose Chinese families were in debt for years, turned over tremendous profits on cleansed drug money. Items could be made for pennies and sold for dollars. Profit was everywhere; only a small number of people involved in all of these organizations really knew the financial facts. And of this small number, only a very carefully selected few knew the whole story. If any of them was found to be untrustworthy, he disappeared without a chance to say good-bye.
How the other families handled the Chinese heroin business was their own concern. Nicholas Ventura never even saw a bag of white powder; nor did any of his employees. At least, not to his knowledge.
Just when his grandfather had begun expressing impatience at the lack of any useful information Nick was passing along to him, Caruso offered Nick a big one.
“This is really out of the lines, Nick,” the professor had told him. “Someone’s gonna be very unhappy about this. But, hey, what the hell. You have to give Papa some really hard stuff every now and then.”
It was very hard stuff. Two of Papa Ventura’s top men, one in the steelworkers’ union, another supposedly involved in illegal bidding in the city’s construction business, were about to be indicted by the grand jury for collusion, bribery, and falsification of official government documents. The government was building a RICO case against both men—and by extension against his grandfather. Facing really hard time, it was hoped that one of the two, or both, would be willing to deal away years for names.
Nick got a call from Caruso the day the sealed indictments were handed down. Both men were to be arrested within the next twenty-four hours. He went straight to his grandfather.
Nicholas Ventura looked over the top of his eyeglasses, holding the notes his grandson had given him. “Tomorrow morning? You are sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
His grandfather went to the phone; made several calls. He spoke quickly, authoritatively, with great certainty.
He then considered Nick thoughtfully. “This could be a step toward building their fucking RICO case against us. How does that work, Nicholas?”
Nick had a feeling his grandfather knew more about RICO than he let on. “Well, Papa, they pull someone in under RICO, it doesn’t matter what they have against you, personally, or your company. If you’re dealing with other organizations, in any way, that are involved in a number of crimes—extortion, murder, arms dealing, importing and exporting of drugs, stolen cars, shipping girls for prostitution, illegal immigration, stolen credit cars, price fixing—any number of things, they get you in their sweep.”
Nicholas Ventura shook his head. “All these things—what have I got to do with arms dealing, young girls?”
“If you deal with anyone involved in any of the activities covered, you don’t have to be involved in everything they do. Just one aspect and you’re vulnerable. When they got the Cosa Nostra, they had miles of bugged conversations on tape; it was all over.”
Ventura was furious. “And this is supposed to be a free country? A man can’t have a conversation in his own home? Hey, how stupid were those guys, they got bugs in their own homes?”
“They did it all legally, Papa. They even got Gotti on the street in his walk-and-talk meetings with his people. It was his main guy who gave him up.”
The old man’s face was hard, his eyes narrowed and blazing. “Scum. Not like in the old days. The vows mean nothing now. Nothing at all. This never would have happened in the old days—we had
honor
then.”
Nick had studied his grandfather’s weary face. “That’s probably why they figured on picking up those two guys I told you about. Play them along. Probably got enough on them to convince them to make a deal. They’re planning to grab a lot of people in your different organizations and tie them together. Leading to you.”
“Well, they’ll have to find them first, right? Hell, that’s what private planes are for. And small islands in the ocean. You pay enough to some of these pompous niggers who run these little countries, they think you’re the great white god.”
He stared at the paper for a moment. “Tell me this, Nicholas. Where did you get this information?”
“Papa, c’mon. You get your information, I get my information. We’re like reporters. We don’t reveal our sources.”
Nick realized what was going on in the old man’s mind.
Someone else
should have told him this, too; should have had access; should have warned him.
He had come to a decision. “You go home now, grandson. This is a very good thing you’ve done. Very good. I have some business to take care of now.”
He embraced Nick, kissed his cheek, and regarded him carefully. Then nodded, as though his trust had been well placed. He would bring Nick in closer. No matter who objected.