Night Work (41 page)

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“First tell me how you are.”

“Not too bad. I actually worked up the courage this afternoon to go look at myself in the mirror.” Her laugh was bitter.

Cassidy leaned forward and kissed her, and the ends of the stitches at the corner of her mouth pricked his lip. “You're going to be fine.”

“Hmmm.” Not agreement or argument. “Tell me about your day.”

They drank the bourbon and smoked the cigarette, and he told her the short version of what had happened in the park. He did not tell her about Dylan.

Later Alice cried out in her sleep. Cassidy put his arm over her, and she woke enough to say “I'm all right. I'm all right,” then moved closer to him, held his hand, and went down into sleep again while he lay awake staring at the ceiling and thinking about what had happened that evening and what would happen tomorrow.

 

27

Cassidy rode the subway south just after rush hour. The
Daily News
gave him the official version of what had happened the night before in Central Park. Anti-Castro Batista supporters had disrupted the rally by setting off small explosive charges in trash cans near the Naumberg Bandshell and firecrackers in the trees nearby. Twelve people, including a member of Mr. Castro's entourage, had been hurt in the ensuing panic. Authorities were pursuing a number of leads. No shootings. No dead men.

The Orso house was on a tree-shaded block in Brooklyn that was a five-minute walk west of Prospect Park. It was in a tidy, blue-collar neighborhood of modest, well-cared-for three- and four-story houses owned by house-proud people who devoted much of their spare time to upkeep and maintenance. The Orso house was in the middle of the block. It was three stories of freshly painted white clapboard fronted by a small concrete yard with a black iron fence. There were pots of geraniums near the stoop, and an American flag on a staff flew from a fixture on one of the burglar grates that protected the ground-floor windows.

Cassidy rang the bell. Moments later he heard the shuffle of feet inside. The door opened a couple of inches against the safety chain. “Detta, it's me.”

The door shut, the chain rattled loose, the door was thrown open wide, and Orso's mother, a small gray-haired woman, grabbed Cassidy in a hug. “Michael, Michael, where've you been? How come you don't come see me no more? Come in. Come in.” Detta Orso dragged him into the house by one hand. The dim front hall smelled of the polish that made the floor slick enough to skate on. She pulled him down the hall and into the kitchen that smelled of baking, talking all the time. “Look at you. Don't you eat? Tony's upstairs. I heard him moving around up there, but he hasn't come down yet. You want a cup of coffee? I just made it fresh. Here, eat this,
cornetto alla marmellata
.” She pushed a plate with a flaky pastry at him. “I make the jam in it. I make the pastry. You don't get this in a store.” She wore a flowered housedress with a yellow apron over it, and her gray hair had been recently permed. She was a small, thin-faced, birdlike woman, and it was hard to see how she could have produced Orso. “I'll call Tony. I'll tell him you're here.”

“Why don't I go up?”

“Sure. Go on up. You know where he is. Tell him to come down, I'll make you both breakfast.”

Cassidy's feet made little noise on the worn stair runner. He climbed past colored reproductions of Naples harbor scenes to the landing where a blond Jesus raised a hand and looked at him benignly from a gold frame. He went down the corridor to the bedroom at the back of the house, knocked on the door, and pushed it open. Orso sat on a wooden chair at a small round table in the windowed alcove that overlooked the backyard and the newly turned spring earth of Detta's vegetable garden. He wore the trousers from the suit he had worn the night before with the suspenders hanging down, and an undershirt. His feet were bare. The bed held an impression from where he had spent the night on top of the covers. The ashtray on the bedside table was full of butts. Cassidy sat down in the chair across the table. A pack of Chesterfields and Orso's service revolver lay between them. Orso glanced at him when he sat down and then went back to staring out the window. Cassidy took one of the cigarettes and lit it. “How're you doing?”

Orso did not look at him. “Great. Yeah, great. Never better.”

“Who approached you? Sanborn?”

Orso looked at him without surprise. “Yeah.”

“Is my brother-in-law in on it?”

“No.” Orso turned back to the window when he answered.

“Sanborn wouldn't know how to get it done. Who'd he go to?”

“That guy from Tampa, Santo Trafficante. He met him while he was down in Havana. And Meyer Lansky. He made some money for Lansky on some real estate deal.”

“Does Sanborn owe those guys money?”

“I don't know. Could be. He talked about how he and Lansky were friends and Lansky had a lock on all casino licenses through Batista. Not much good if Castro took over the casinos.”

“How much were you in for?”

“About thirty-five grand. That was Dad's insurance, some savings she had, I took another mortgage on the house.” Orso breathed a deep sigh. “I gave it to Sanborn last summer. He was pretty goddamn sure Batista was going to kick Castro's ass.”

“But he didn't.”

“No. I told them I needed to get the money back. I wanted out. I just wanted to make it right for her.” He glanced at Cassidy to see if he was believed, if he was understood. “Sanborn said it wasn't that easy. I'd signed papers saying I'd leave the money in for two years.”

“What'd they ask for to let you out?”

“I was to let them know Castro's schedule. I was supposed to make sure the maintenance shed was clear, make sure no one but me checked it. That was all.”

“But you knew what they were going to do.”

“Sure I knew, but I wasn't going to let myself look at it hard.” He looked over at Cassidy. “You ever do that, not look at something hard 'cause you don't want to see what you're going to see?”

“All the time.”

“How'd you figure it out?”

“I didn't, really. But you've been fucked up all week, and you've been worrying about money in a way you never did before. Then I went back to the general's apartment to see if Fuentes had been back. The doorman let it drop that there was a cab in front when you came out with Fuentes, but that you didn't want to take it. That's not what you told me, so I thought about that for a while.”

Orso reached for a cigarette from the pack on the table. His hand brushed his service pistol. When he drew his hand back, he pulled the gun toward him. “Did they send you to bring me in?”

“No. I came on my own.”

“Because I'm not going in, so you might as well take off.” His hand covered the gun.

“She gets to clean it up, I guess. The blood all over the wallpaper, the shit and piss on the floor. Gets to look at you and then clean it up.”

“Fuck you. I can go to the park.” His grip on the gun was white knuckled.

“Sure. Why not? Some mom and her six-year-old can find you.” Cassidy pulled another cigarette. “You're not going to do Detta any good dead.”

“I'm not going to do her any good in jail.”

“Who says you're going to jail?”

“Don't fuck with me, Mike. You can get away with a lot of crap in the Department, but they can't let this slide.”

“The shooters are dead. The hoods and Sanborn aren't going to talk about it. I'm the only one who knows.”

Orso looked at him with the beginning of hope.

“Have they contacted you since last night?”

“No.”

“Castro's leaving on an afternoon train. Do you think they'll try for him again?”

“I don't know. Maybe. They've got a lot at stake.”

“That's what I think.”

*   *   *

Cassidy left. Orso sat at the table and pulled the gun close. He stuck his finger in the trigger guard and spun the gun on the tabletop. It stopped with the barrel point at the bed. He spun it again. It pointed at him. He spun it again. It pointed at him again. He lit a cigarette and thought about his choices.

 

28

Castro's train was scheduled out of Penn Station at four o'clock. The security briefing took place in his suite in the hotel on Seventh Avenue. The living room of the suite was thick with cigar smoke and crowded with bearded men in fatigues and with cops. There had been a few women in cocktail dresses when Cassidy arrived. They popped up like flowers after a rain wherever Castro went in the city. One of them was in the bedroom with Castro, and the others, exotic birds among the khaki and uniformed men, ignored each other and focused on the closed door in nervous anticipation of a summons. Cassidy knocked on the door and announced his presence and with Ribera's help shooed the protesting women out. “Sometimes,” Ribera said, “I think he is trying by himself to father an entire new generation of free Cubans.”

“Pleasant work if your back holds out,” Cassidy said.

“Until recently I did not understand how strong an aphrodisiac power is. They come scratching at his door at night like cats. I'll be happy to get him back to his wife and mistress. Let them sort him out.”

“I'll be happy to have him on a train out of here.”

“Sometime you will have to tell me what happened last night. We'll get drunk on good Cuban rum and tell each other the truth about things. I will explain to you about art and love, and you will tell me how three assassins were able to hide inside the security perimeter.”

“I have no idea. It was lucky I was close by.”

“It will take a lot of rum, I suspect.
In vino, veritas
. Was Dylan there?”

“Yes.”

“But you made her go.”

“Yes.” Ribera put an arm around Cassidy's shoulder and hugged him. “You're a good man, Michael. Slava is in Roosevelt Hospital speaking Spanish, very little English, and no Russian.”

“Get him out of town before I have to arrest him.”

*   *   *

Assistant Deputy Chief Holloway was in charge of the briefing. The consensus among the street cops was that Chief Clarkson was keeping his distance in case there was another fuckup. Chief Holloway looked like everything you would want in a cop. He was tall, broad-shouldered, flat-bellied, trim in his tailored uniform. He had thick, dark hair with elegant flecks of gray at the temples. He was square-jawed, and cleft-chinned, and when he smiled, his teeth were as even and white as Chiclets. He clapped his hands twice for silence.

“Gentlemen, after last night's incident, the New York City Police Department feels that we should take extraordinary precautions to make sure that Mr. Castro's departure from this city is a safe one. You've all been briefed on the plan, and we think it will minimize any danger to Mr. Castro. Sergeant Olotka, would you stand up, please. A large man rose from a chair in the corner of the room. His beard was not as long and scraggly as Castro's, but he was about the same size as the Cuban leader, and in the fatigues he wore he could easily be mistaken for him from a distance. “Sergeant Olotka has volunteered for duty as a decoy. He and the rest of the Cuban group will leave the front of the hotel on my signal. Uniformed officers will escort them quickly cross Seventh Avenue and into Penn Station. They will proceed directly to Track Nine, where the train is waiting and will enter the second-to-last car, which has been reserved exclusively for them. They will be covered all the way by more than sixty officers. We feel that this public display will draw the attention of anyone out there who means to harm Mr. Castro. At the same time, those people will have no access to their target. Mind you, after last night's incident, we do not believe that there is another threat. This is purely a precautionary measure. At the same time, the real Mr. Castro, with a small escort, will take a separate elevator to the basement of the hotel, access the steam tunnels that connect it with Penn Station, and will proceed to Track Nine unseen. Any questions?”

There were none.

“Thank you, gentlemen. I will see you downstairs in the lobby in ten minutes.” Chief Holloway smiled, touched a finger to his forehead in salute, and left the suite.

“We're going to adjust a couple of things about that plan,” Cassidy told the assembled crowd after the chief left.

*   *   *

The tunnels that led from the hotel basement to Penn Station were dim corridors lit by wide-spaced, naked bulbs. The walls were brick and stone, and the floors were concrete. Asbestos-wrapped pipes carried water and steam from generator plants buried fifty feet below the streets. The pipes were old and some of them leaked at the joints, so the floor was wet in places. The air was thick and it smelled of mold and hot stone and the tunnels echoed with mechanical clicks and bangs and the hiss of steam. Every once in a while, Orso could hear the scratching run of rats along the asbestos wrappings.

Orso stood in a deep alcove in one of the tunnels. There was a metal door at his back, and behind it he could hear the whirr and clank of machinery, but he had no idea of what it was or what it did. He stubbed out a cigarette and resisted the temptation to light another. He checked his watch.
Maybe he isn't coming. Maybe this was over. Ahh, fuck, man. How did I get here? Little by little, and then in a rush, the way most bad things happened. Maybe he isn't coming
.

He heard the scrape of shoes on concrete. Moments later Diego Fuentes stopped just down the tunnel from the alcove. He held a stubby, black machine pistol that Orso did not recognize. When he saw that Orso was alone, he let it dangle.

“Detective.”

“Colonel.”

“Is everything in order?”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

Orso led him along the tunnel toward the hotel basement, coldly conscious of a man with a gun at his back. He stopped where two more tunnels came in from the left and the right. “One of us on either side.”