“That's not much of an answer.”
“What are you, fucking senile, Gibbons? A year into retirement and you forgot everything. Let me give you a refresher course in reality, man. It was
you
who clued me into the way things work at the Bureau,
you
who told me how justice really works in this country. All those hours we spent on all those plants, you bitching to me about how Ivers flushed all our good work down the toilet, bending my ear about how rich people buy themselves out of trouble, how judges jump on the small-time criminals but invite the big-timers to dinner. Is any of this coming back to you, Gib?”
It was, but Gibbons didn't say anything.
“I'm just doing what we always talked about doing,” Tozzi continued, still spitting venom. “I'm taking justice into my own handsâthere, I said it, plain as could be. Eliminating a handful of career criminals is a hell of a lot better than working within a system that makes me totally ineffectual. That's how I see it.”
Gibbons exhaled slowly. There was nothing he could say in response. He agreed with everything Tozzi had said, and he did remember all the growling tirades in the dark when he'd said those exact same things to Tozzi. But with him it was always just talk, blowing steam. Tozzi was actually doing something about it.
“And after you've wiped out everybody on your hit list, what then?”
“I've made plans. I've got relatives . . . out of the country.”
Gibbons stared at him for a long moment, then sighed and holstered his gun.
“What're you doing?” Tozzi demanded. “You're supposed to shoot meâno, what's the word they use?â'neutralize' me. They sent you to neutralize me, man. So come on, get with it. Youâre the fucking company manâdo it!”
The gun was shaking in Tozzi's hand. Gibbons had never seen him so upset and it made him uncomfortable. He slowly laid his hand on the doorknob.
Tozzi abruptly pointed his gun in Gibbons's face. “I don't want to kill you, Gib, I really and truly don't, but I'm not through yet. I'm onto something big, really big, and I don't want any interference.”
There was a hollow, gnawing sensation in Gibbons's gut. He stared at Tozzi's gun, avoiding his eyes. “I've gone through our old files. My guess is that you're next target is either Felix Kramer or Reverend Miner.”
“Neither one. There's just one more name on my hit list . . . but I don't know who he is yet.” Tozzi waited for Gibbons to look him in the eye. They stared at each other, but Tozzi seemed to be sizing up his old partner, wondering whether Gibbons could still be trusted. Suddenly Tozzi lowered his gun. “Sit down, Gib. There's something I've got to show you.”
Reluctantly Gibbons sat down on the edge of the plastic-covered sofa while Tozzi went into the bedroom. It crossed his mind that Tozzi could come back out with guns blazing, but he resisted the urge to pull his weapon. Tozzi wasn't like that. Even if his old partner had gone renegade, Gibbons felt he could trust Tozzi that way.
A moment later Tozzi emerged from the bedroom, an ugly look on his face. He was carrying a stuffed manila envelope, which he dropped on the coffee table in front of Gibbons. “Take a look at these.”
Gibbons opened the envelope and pulled out a curled sheaf of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. They looked like surveillance shots. He flipped through them quicklyâguys in parking lots, on the street, sitting in cars, getting out of carsâthen he slowed down when he started to recognize faces. They were all FBI agents from the Manhattan field office.
“Did you take these?” he asked Tozzi.
Tozzi took the pile away from him and shuffled through the photos quickly. He pulled one out and showed it to Gibbons. It was a picture of the two of them seated at a lunch counter.
“Where did you get these?”
Tozzi sat down next to Gibbons. “Remember Vinnie Clementi? The pusher?”
“Yeah?”
“I found them in his apartment after I did him. There are twenty-six pictures here, thirty-eight agents in all.” Tozzi was breathing fast. “And get this, he knew my name.”
“Who knew your name?”
“Clementi. The scumbag was standing in my face, begging for mercy, and he called me by my name. He called me âMikey.'”
Gibbons stared down at the photos scattered over the coffee table. Some of these faces he'd known for over twenty years. “Clementi knew your name was Michael,” he murmured absently, searching for the angle. He looked at his own face in the picture. It was tired and creased, an old man's face. “Somebody's been tailing agents,” he said sadly.
“Damn straight. And that means somebody's been
fingering
agents,” Tozzi said. “Somebody who knows us. Somebody on the inside.”
Gibbons's stomach started to ache. His temper suddenly flared. “What the fuck is this, Tozzi? You go AWOL and turn into a vigilante, and now you're trying to tell me you're onto a bad agent? What're you trying to pull?”
Tozzi looked him in the eye, then looked away. “I didn't
want
to find these pictures.”
“Why did you toss Clementi's apartment, tell me that. You did a real job on the place. The guy who did the report on the apartment said the perp was clearly looking for something, looking for something pretty badly.”
“Who did the report?” Tozzi asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Anybody I know?”
“Some new guyâI don't know his nameâjust transferred to New York from the Philly office. What were you looking for at Clementi's?”
“Address books, ledgers, anything that might lead to his connection.”
“So you could go execute him too?”
“Since when do you start taking up for drug dealers, Gib?”
“When some asshole starts taking the law into his own hands.”
“Fuck you, Gibbons. You and I both know this is the only way to get these guys. They're too big, too smart, they buy the best lawyers. I've thought this through. It's the only effective way to put these guys out of action.”
Gibbons wasn't about to argue with that. He let out a slow breath until the testiness ran out of him. “You said you stumbled onto something big. Give it to me. The Bureau will handle it in-house.”
“The hell they will. Whoever's responsible
is
in-house. I'm sure of that.”
“So what do you think?” Gibbons asked. Tozzi had to have a theory: in all the years they'd worked together, Tozzi always managed to cook up some kind of Sherlock Holmes solution.
“Hang on, let me show you something.”
Gibbons watched Tozzi go through the photos. He picked out two and laid them down next to the picture of the two of them at the lunch counter. He watched Tozzi's hands, long and quick, gambler's hands, just as he remembered them. The sweaty forehead was something new, though.
“Here.” Tozzi pointed to a picture of an agent in a heavy overcoat emerging from a car on a busy Main Street somewhere. You could see his breath in the cold. “Dave Simmons, right? Look in the background.” Tozzi pointed to a blurry movie marquee in the background. “See what it says?
Terms of Endearment.
That movie was released in the fall of eighty-three, I checked. It was the big movie that year, stayed in the theaters all that winter. This means they've been watching our guys forâwhat?âalmost three years?”
Gibbons thought it was interesting that Tozzi referred to the agents in the pictures as “our guys.” In all his years with the Bureau, he himself never thought of it as a brotherhood.
“Now look at this.” Tozzi snatched up their picture. “Look on the counter, next to my coffee.”
There was a small white bottle in front of Tozzi, a crumpled-up napkin next to it.
“Cold pills. I remember, three winters ago, I had a stupid cold that I couldn't shake and I was taking those pills that're supposed to keep you going. They didn't work for shit, and my nose was running all over the place. Now the way I figure, this had to have been taken somewhere on Staten Island. We were checking out that construction company, remember?”
Gibbons nodded. “I remember. It was February, March of eighty-four.”
Tozzi dropped their picture and grabbed the third one. It showed a crowd of standing men, most of them smoking, some looking around, others studying racing forms. There was a row of betting windows in the background. A circle had been drawn around two of the men standing together in the crowd, both in their mid-thirties. One was wearing a leather jacket over a crewneck sweater, the other a light-colored suit with no tie. “Kozlowski and Driscoll. I'm positive this was taken at
Aqueduct.” Tozzi tapped the picture with his index finger. “They were undercover at the time, had a warehouse setup somewhere out on Long Island. They were posing as small-time fences looking for some big-time action. I remember this distinctly because Kozlowski came to me to show me this shitty little goatee he'd grown. He wanted to know if I thought he looked Italian enough.”
“What'd you tell him?”
“I told him he looked okay, but it was his rotten kielbasy breath that would give him away.” Tozzi laughed, but Gibbons could tell his heart wasn't in it.
Gibbons stared at the faces of the two agents. “These guys were undercover, and somebody knew who they were.” He shook his head. “This is bad . . .”
“And it gets worse.” Tozzi grabbed the envelope and pulled out a handwritten list. Gibbons immediately recognized Tozzi's hasty block printing. “These are the names of the guys I picked out of the pictures. Thirty-eight agents in all. But who's missing?”
Gibbons scanned the list quickly, then went back over it one by one. What was Tozzi driving at? He shrugged and shook his head.
“If these pictures were taken in the winter and early spring of eighty-four, there are three very obvious omissions here.”
Three. Gibbons stopped breathing. Of course. Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Jesus Christ . . .
He rubbed the back of his neck and looked hard at Tozzi, his gut churning. Lando, Blaney, and Novickâthree guys who hardly knew each other but whose names were permanently linked, always mentioned in the same hushed breath, three names that still made federal agents swallow hard and think anxious thoughts about their kids and wives. Everybody knew the story, but for those agents who were active at the time, it would never go away and would always be a startling reminder of what could happen on the job.
It started out as a gruesome puzzle, didn't even concern the Bureau at first. Three bodies found in the middle of a field of high grass behind a grammar school in Stamford, Connecticut. Three male bodies without heads. It was late September 1984.
Then, a few days later, on the last Saturday of the month, a postal worker drove up to a mailbox on a fairly busy road near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to make his first pickup of the day. He found a large package on the ground next to the box, the corners crushed and
torn as if someone had tried to jam it in but couldn't make it fit. He picked it up, immediately thinking that the damn thing would have to be returned. It was heavy, thirty, forty pounds from the feel of it, and he was sure there wasn't enough postage on it. He turned the box over on the hood of his Jeep and saw almost thirty twenty-cent stamps plastered down the right-hand side of the package in uneven overlapping lines, lines of American flags ripped from a roll and haphazardly pasted down. No return address. Then he noticed the carefully printed address done with a black felt-tip pen:
DIRECTOR
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
WASHINGTON, DC 20535
The postal worker set the package down gently, crossed to the other side of the street, and flagged down the next police car that came by.
Two hours later the NYPD bomb squad trailer arrived on the scene and took possession of the package. The bomb squad truck looks like a giant chain-mail jelly roll and is specially designed to contain an explosion while in transit. They took the package to the police firing range at Pelham Bay Park on the other side of the Bronx for examination and detonation if necessary. As part of their routine procedure, one of the men on the bomb squad X-rayed the package to see just what he was dealing with. What he saw made his mouth go dry.
That afternoon the package was transferred to the city medical examiner, who opened it with an FBI lab tech in attendance so as not to lose any possible evidence, like fingerprints, lint, hair, or saliva. Inside they found what the bomb squad told them to expect, three human heads. But the bomb squad X rays didn't prepare them for the rest of it, not the smell or the first sight of the mottled yellowed faces, and certainly not the gouged-out eyes. Three heads lined up on a stainless steel tray, six horrible raw holes looking at nothing. Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Gibbons remembered the ME's report saying that in each of the victims there were signs of clotting in the torn optic nerves, indicating that the eyes had been ripped out before death.
Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Before they were killed, they had each been working alone, undercover, infiltrating organized crime in the New York families. They posed as eager-beaver hoods, anxious to find a regular gig with the mob. They were swimming with sharks. Lando had an office over a plumbing-supply company in Uniondale
where he took care of the books for Sabatini Mistretta's loan-sharking operations on Long Island. Blaney was running numbers for a lieutenant in Phillip Giovinazzo's family, working out of a car wash on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. Novick was working for a trucking business owned by one of Joe Luccarelli's associates, driving oranges, grapefruit, and cocaine twice a week from Florida to the farmers' market in Newark. They swam with sharks, and they got their heads bitten off.