“You say I’m richer than you thought. I’m richer than you know. We live modestly. If I built a big mansion, everybody would say, there’s Don Merolla’s grandson, living on mob money. If I owned racehorses, boats, fancy cars, same thing. If I tried to buy a television network, I’d have the FCC, FBI, IRS, the whole alphabet on my neck. Not that they don’t come around, anyway. I can’t have a birthday party for one of my boys without the DEA trying to bug the ice cream cake.
“I’ll tell you this one time, Ed, because we’re friends: I’m not involved with the wise guys. I’m a businessman. I’m clean.”
Ed looked at the anger in Marc’s eyes and knew they weren’t going to be friends anymore.
“You took his money,” Ed said.
“He’s my grandfather.”
Their eyes were drawn by a burst of activity on the television screen. A home-team player caught a bomb and tossed the ball to the crowd.
“He did us a favor,” Ed said.
“You do business with him; I don’t.”
“Why did he give you our marker?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it. Ask him.”
“Marc …”
“He’s my grandfather,” Marc said. “He wants to look out for me.”
“And that’s it.”
Marc stood up.
“I’m through being interrogated by you,” he said. “You want to blow us up with the FCC, do it. And keep your damn marker; I don’t need you.”
Ed stayed seated. The television replayed the touchdown while an invisible hand drew squiggly white lines all over the screen.
“That’s the funny thing,” he said. “I think you do.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve heard of Carmine Bascaglia?”
“I read the papers.”
“One of his captains has a hook into Jack Landis. He’s bleeding you dry.”
On the screen, two buxom women mocked orgasm over a light beer.
Marc said, “I’m calling the cops.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
A truck bounced up a muddy road to the summit of a mountain. A man and a woman got out and embraced as they shared the stunning panorama below.
Ed answered, “People will get hurt and you’ll lose your money.”
There was a long silence. The afternoon sun was falling and the den was getting dark. Marc turned on a lamp, sat down, and raised the volume on the football game.
San Diego was down by three points to Pittsburgh.
They watched the game for a few minutes, then Marc said, “You’re going to make a deal, aren’t you?”
“We’re going to try.”
“And it’ll leave Bascaglia’s people with a piece of the business,” Marc said. “Otherwise, you couldn’t make the deal.”
“That’s right.”
“That stinks.”
“I agree.”
Ed watched the game for a few minutes, then he got up and left. Marc didn’t see him to the door.
“What do you want to drink, sweetie?” Gloria asked.
“I don’t drink,” her guest said.
She leaned forward to give him a preview of coming attractions and asked, “Do you have any vices, I hope?”
And what is it with hands this weekend? First she brings home a guy with one hand; now she picks up a stray with a bandaged paw.
“Well,” the guy answered, ‘just last night I got fucked at the Bluebird Motel.”
He had the pistol on her before she could scream.
“Now go ahead and have your drink,” he said.
Will they ever come out of there? Walter Withers wondered as he lay on the floor next to the door of his hotel room. He had been listening for over twenty-four hours, which far exceeded the timetable in his plan.
It was such a good plan, too. The indomitable Ms. Haber had bribed the ever-tumescent young Bobby—who now had dates with several months’ worth of young ladies with strong exhibitionist tendencies—to arrange a room directly across the hall from that young snake Neal and the valuable Polly Paget.
Then Withers had been spirited up the room in the bottom of a delivery cart—an uncomfortable journey; however, not without a certain whimsical quality—where the plan had called for him to listen vigilantly for the opening of doors and watch the hallway through the peephole until opportunity arose—opportunity for access to Ms. Paget.
A fine plan, Withers thought as he lay on the floor by the door, save for the target’s unreasonable stubbornness in holding to their fortress and the treacherous presence of a cabinet stuffed to bursting with spirits.
The courtesy bar was calling to Withers.
It’s the damn boredom, he thought, the bane of surveillance. The brain-killing, spirit-stifling, buttocks-numbing tedium of interminable waiting. A condition that could be ameliorated by the contents of the courtesy bar. Yes, its contents could soften the suffering, take the edge off boredom’s sharp blade, surround one in the comfort of an old friend’s embrace.
Think of the money, he told himself. You are no longer a young sprite, and it is high time to think of building a retirement fund, a fund that could be well started on the photographic reproduction of Ms. Paget’s nubile body, which lies just across the hall as the object of your vigilance.
Spurn the sweet, soft song of the liquor cabinet for the cold, hard logic of cash.
Still, there must be a better way.
If only Gloria would return his calls, perhaps she could persuade Polly to come across the hall.
If I can just make the pitch, he thought.
He dialed Gloria’s number again. Again, the damnably cheerful message warbled through the phone.
“Gloria, it’s me again, Walter,” he said. “I really do wish you would return my call. I have located Polly—small thanks to you, I might add—and am, in fact, just across the hallway from her. Please call. I am in room twelve-forty, The Last Days of Pompeii Resort and Casino Hotel, oh two-five five five-four six six three.”
I have such a headache, Withers thought. Perhaps one little drink.
He found the key and opened the courtesy bar.
Gloria never heard the phone.
She was lying in a tubful of hot water and her own blood.
She had told him everything, of course, while he was forcing her to gulp the scotch down. She told him about the one-armed man and the phone call long before he told her to swallow the pills.
Overtime heard Withers’s message, though. He had just finished wiping the knife handle and pressing her fingerprints onto the handle.
Poor drunken slut, he thought. Prey to the sad but banal combination of booze, drugs, and guilt.
He erased the message tape and left for the airport.
At about the time Gloria died, a black limousine pulled up to an iron-gated courtyard off St. Claude Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter. The driver’s window rolled down; the uniformed guard checked out the driver and the three passengers and waved the limousine in.
The driver parked at the top of an oval driveway next to a three-story Spanish neoclassical building, replete with terracotta-tiled roof, wrought-iron balconies, and creeping ivy. Two bodyguards walked Joe Graham up the stone steps and into the building.
The floors were highly polished octagonal black-and-white tiles. The walls were painted chalk white and held large gilt-framed oil paintings of New Orleans street scenes. A marble staircase, flanked by a wrought-iron railing, curved up to the right, and the bodyguards led Graham up these stairs. Video cameras were recessed on swivels in the plaster ceiling.
A guard sat at an antique table at the top of the stairs, the bulge of a pistol prominent under his jacket. He nodded to the two guards, pressed the button on the intercom, and said that Mr. Bascaglia’s two o’clock appointment had arrived. A feminine voice replied that he should be sent right in.
They walked past the table, down the hall to a large mahogany door. The first bodyguard knocked. There was an electric buzz, the lock sprang open, and they were in a narrow waiting room decorated in a blue Napoleonic theme.
An attractive older woman in a blue business suit sat at another antique table. She smiled at them, knocked on a door behind her, stuck her head in, and announced them.
“You can go right in,” she said.
Carmine Bascaglia sat behind a large table. Behind him, a floor-to-ceiling window of thick bulletproof glass allowed a splendid view of old New Orleans, from the private courtyard garden directly below to the shabbily genteel old buildings of the French Quarter down the street.
Bascaglia’s desk was spare except for two stacks of paper—one on the left, one on the right—a gold fountain pen, a pitcher of water, and a single glass.
One wooden chair, smaller and plainer than the Queen Anne Bascaglia sat on, had been set directly in front of the desk. The walls of the office were covered with thick gold-and-blue wallpaper. Portraits of Spanish ladies, also gilt-framed, hung on the walls.
Bascaglia looked tall even sitting down. He wore an elegantly tailored slate gray suit with subtle white striping, an off-white Italian shirt with cuff links, and a blood red tie. His gray hair, starting to thin, was brushed straight back and he wore gold-rimmed glasses on his Roman nose.
The bodyguards led Graham to the chair in front of the desk and then took their places in the corners.
“I have fifteen minutes for you, Mr. Graham,” he said without introduction. “I will begin. One: You think you are a funny son of a bitch, but you are not a funny son of a bitch.”
He paused to let Graham agree.
Graham nodded.
“Two: When we want comedians, we hire them and they perform in nightclubs. They tell humorous jokes and we laugh. They do not tell allegorical anecdotes in restaurants or shove people into rivers.”
He paused again and stared at Graham.
Graham nodded.
“Three: I have no sense of humor. I don’t have the time for one. Neither do you. Are we in agreement?”
“Yes, we are, Mr. Bascaglia,” Graham said.
“Good,” Bascaglia said. “The only reason I gave you an appointment is that Dominic Merolla requested it. I required that you represent your organization because I wanted to tell you personally that the antics in San Antonio are to stop forthwith.”
“There won’t be any more, Mr. Bascaglia.”
“Now, what seems to be the problem, Mr. Graham?”
Graham felt butterflies in his stomach the way he used to when he was sent to the Mother Superior’s office as a kid, except worse. The nun might hit you with a ruler; Carmine Bascaglia might make you a concrete lawn ornament at the bottom of the Mississippi.
Graham said, “One of your subordinates in Texas, a Mr. Foglio, is engaged in business practices that are proving harmful to interests we represent.
“Mr. Foglio’s business is to make money,” Bascaglia answered. “I assume you’re referring to that amusement park?”
“Candyland, yeah.”
‘”Joe Foglio is a contractor on the project,” Bascaglia said. “It’s all aboveboard.”
Graham coughed and said, “As a matter of fact, sir, there’s quite a bit that’s uh, below-board.”
“Let’s not play games,” Bascaglia said. “In recent years, we have made a successful effort to move our monies into legitimate businesses such as construction, trucking, entertainment, and various investments. If Joe Foglio traded on certain names to acquire business …”
Bascaglia held his palms up.
“Our client is happy for Mr. Foglio’s various companies to have the work,” Graham continued. “They’d be happier, though, if he’d stop robbing them blind.”
“I don’t make it my habit to pry into the details of my associates’ businesses, and Mr. Foglio’s profit margins are a detail best left to him.”
Graham started to rub his artificial fist into his real palm. He thought for a minute and then said, “Years ago, I worked for a guy who owned a chain of movie theaters. He hired me to see how much the staff was stealing. And he told me, ‘Joe, if they’re just stealing supper, let ’em. I don’t want to know.… It turned out that they were stealing dinner money. They were happy; he was happy. But Joey Foglio is stealing supper, lunch, breakfast, midday snacks, the table, the chairs, the cabinets, and the kitchen linoleum.
“Sir, when the old men threw Joey out of New York, you took him on because you thought he could make money, I know that. But now he’s got his hands around the throat of the golden goose. If that’s not enough for you, he’s also ordered a hit on a young woman who isn’t involved in your business, and he’s aligned himself—and you, I guess—against the direct interests of the Merolla family.”
Graham saw a scary, cold look come across Bascaglia’s eyes.
“What’s the Merolla family got to do with this?” he asked.
“The grandkid is Jack Landis’s partner.”
“The grandson isn’t in the family business,” Bascaglia said.
“His grandfather loves him, anyway.”
Bascaglia took his sweet time thinking this over while Graham pictured chunks of himself floating into the Gulf of Mexico.
“I’ve always believed,” Bascaglia finally said, “that violence is the first recourse of the foolish man and the last resort of the wise man.”
Graham was relieved to hear that.
“I don’t want a war with the Merolla family,” Bascaglia concluded.
“No one’s talking war here, sir.”
Bascaglia seemed to be thinking out loud when he said, “But I can’t take Joe Foglio’s business away from him.”
Graham was thinking that a man rumored to have arranged the assassination of a United States President could probably blow off a bum like Joey Beans, but he didn’t voice the opinion.
“We believe that there’s a lot of room for negotiation here,” Graham said. “Funny, but it all kind of hinges on this woman who says Landis raped her.”
“Paula somebody.”
“Polly Paget, yeah.”
“How is she central to this dispute?”
“She’s got FCN by the short hairs, and if she takes the company down, everybody loses,” Graham explained. “See, Joey’s trying to whack her; we’re trying to protect her; Merolla and Hathaway are trying to use her.…”
“Can you deliver her?” Bascaglia asked.
I hope so, Joe thought.
“We have influence,” he said. “With the right deal—”
“Yes or no, Mr. Graham.”
This in a voice telling me that I deliver her to a deal or you deliver her to a morgue, and somehow I don’t see Neal standing by waving olé to a hit on this woman.