Beirut Incident (15 page)

Popeye glowered at us, the hatred in his soul seething in his eyes.

He's upset about Spelman, I thought gleefully, but I was wrong.

"You, Locallo!" he barked.

"Yes, sir." The hood looked scared.

"Which one of you guys was the last one to see that Chinese broad, Su Lao Lin, in Beirut?"

Locallo spread his hands helplessly. "I dunno. Me and Manitti, we left together."

"I think it was Canzoneri here," Louie piped up, gesturing in my direction. "I left him there when I took Harold to the hospital." He glanced at me with a I-have-to-tell-the-truth look.

"Were you the last one there?" Popeye snapped.

I shrugged. "I don't know. I talked to her for a few minutes after Louie left, then she sent me over to see that guy Harkins, the penman."

"Do you know if she was expecting anyone after you left?"

I shook my head.

His eyes narrowed in thought, looking at me. "Hmmmm! You musta been the last one to see Harkins, too."

He was getting too close for comfort, although I didn't really sense that I was in a lot of trouble at the moment. "No," I said innocently, "there was that other guy there. Came in right before I left. But, wait!" I feigned a look of sudden recollection. "I think he was the same guy I saw hanging around in the lobby of Miss Lin's hotel when I left." I pressed my fingers to my forehead. "Yeah, the same guy."

Popeye sat up straight, pounding a fist onto the desktop. "What guy?"

"Hell, I don't know if I remember. Let's see… Harkins introduced me. Fuggi, I think, or something like that… Fuggiero… I don't remember exactly."

"Ruggiero?" He fairly shot the words at me.

I snapped my fingers. "Yeah. That's it. Ruggiero."

"Goddamn! What was his first name?"

I shrugged. "Gee, I don't know. Bill, maybe, or Joe, or something like that."

"And you say you saw him in the hotel?"

I spread my hands, palms up. "Yeah. He was in the lobby, waiting for the elevator, when I came out. I remember now, I recognized him later when he came into Harkins' place."

"What did he look like?"

"You know, kind of average. He was dark…" I pretended to concentrate, frowning thoughtfully. I might as well make it good while I was at it. "I guess about five-foot-ten, kind of dark skin. Oh yeah, I remember. He was wearing a dark blue suit."

Popeye shook his head. "He don't sound familiar, but there's so many goddamned Ruggieros, it's hard to tell." He slammed his fist on the desktop again, then spun his wheelchair so he was looking directly at Louie. "That Chinese broad say anything about the Ruggieros to you?"

Louie shook his head. "No, sir, not a word." He hesitated. "What happened, Uncle Joe?"

Popeye glared at him in a fury. "They got blown up! That's what happened! Some son of a bitch went in there just after you guys took off and blew the goddamned place up. A bomb, for Chrissake! Vinnie just called from Beirut. He says it's all over the papers there."

"What about Su Lao Lin?"

"Dead as a goddamned doornail, Vinnie says."

Louie was as upset as his uncle now, arms akimbo on his hips, head thrust forward. I wondered if he'd made love to her, too.

"Anyone else hurt?"

Popeye shook his head, almost as if he were disappointed. "Nah. Except that goddamned Charlie Harkins got shot."

"Is he dead, too?"

Popeye nodded. "Yeah."

Louie frowned. "You think the Ruggieros did it?" Good boy, Louie, I applauded silently.

"Of course I think the Ruggieros did it," Popeye roared. "What the hell you think? Canzoneri here sees a Ruggiero in the dame's hotel, then meets him at Harkins' joint. Then there are two dead bodies. You don't think there's a connection? You think maybe it's just a coincidence?"

"No, no, Uncle Joe," Louie placated. "Except I don't know why the Ruggieros would knock them off. We even brought in a few guys for them through Beirut. It doesn't make any sense unless they're just out to get us."

"Goddamn! What the hell do you think?" Popeye picked up the newspaper from his desk and waved it, "Did you read the goddamned paper this morning?"

Louie shrugged. "I don't know, Uncle Joe. Larry's been missing before when he's gone off on a jag. That story could just be a lot of bull. You know how Hobby Miller is. That guy Gourlay can make him say anything he wants."

But the old man was not to be put down. He waved the paper again. "What about Beirut, then, smart-alec? What about it?"

Louie nodded, trying to puzzle it out. "Yeah, I know. The two together are just too much. I guess they're going out to get us all right, but Jeez! just a few weeks ago everything seemed to be going all right."

"Goddamn!" The old man pounded one fist into the palm of his other hand. "It don't sound all right to me!"

Louie shook his head. "I know, I know, Uncle Joe. But a street war doesn't make sense right now. We got enough troubles."

"We gotta do something! I ain't going to take that kind of shit from nobody," Popeye shouted.

"Okay, okay," Louie said. "So what do you want us to do?"

The old man's eyes narrowed, and he backed a half-turn away from his desk. "Kill me someone, goddamn! Just a little one, maybe. I don't want no Ruggiero. Not yet. I don't. I just want 'em to know we don't mess around." The hate in Popeye's eyes leaped with excitement now. The old man could smell blood. His fat hand clenched the rollbar of his wheelchair. "Go on, goddammit," he shouted. "Get moving!"

Louie and I sat hunched over cups of
cappuchino
in the Decima Coffee House on West Broadway.

The walls were a chocolate brown, and the worn linoleum on the floor, perhaps green years ago, was a filthy black. A dozen oversized, gilt-framed paintings hung from the walls, their canvases barely distinguishable through a patina of fly specks and grease. A dirty glass counter showcase displayed a tired collection of pastries —
napoleone, baba al rum, mille foglie, cannoli, pasticiotti.
The only evidence of cleanliness was the magnificent espresso machine at the other end of the counter. It gleamed brightly, all silver and black, polished to a high sheen. Atop it an eagle rampant, its wings spread defiantly, reigned in cast-iron glory.

Louie looked a little sick.

I stirred my coffee. "What's the matter, Louie? Hangover? Or haven't you ever wasted anyone before?"

He nodded bleakly. "No… well, no. You know…"

I knew, all right. All of a sudden it was no longer so clean for Uncle Joe's little nephew Louie. All his life he'd been glorying in the Mafia game with all of its excitement, romance, money and mystique. But he had never really been involved himself. For Louie, life had been a good private school, a good college, a good easy job running a legitimate olive oil business, a good time associating with famous mobsters but unsullied by them.

Even his name was clean, I remembered again. "Louie," I asked, "how come your name is Lazaro? Wasn't your Dad named Franzini?"

Louie nodded, smiling ruefully. "Yeah. Luigi Franzini. Lazaro is my mother's maiden name. Uncle Joe had it changed for me when I came to live with him. I guess he wanted to keep me away from all the trouble. I mean, you wouldn't want your kid to be named Al Capone, Jr."

I laughed. "Yeah. Guess you're right. So what are you going to do now?" I asked.

He spread his hands helplessly. "I don't know. It's not like anyone did anything, really. I mean, hell, to just go out and blast a guy because he belongs to the Ruggieros…"

It's the facts of life, sonny boy, I thought. I squeezed his shoulder. "You'll think of something, Louie," I said comfortingly.

We stepped out of the Decima and Louie looked up and down the street for a moment, as if trying to make up his mind. "Look, Nick," he said with a sudden grin, "why don't I show you the Counting House?"

"Counting House?"

"Yeah. It's great. The only one of its kind in the world, I'll bet." He took my elbow and led me down the street a few doors. "It's right here, Four fifteen West Broadway."

It didn't look like much. Another one of those big old loft buildings you see in the Soho section of downtown New York. There was a big blue door over a wide ramp, which I guessed to be the freight elevator. To the right of it was an ordinary residence-type windowed door, with the standard apartment house bank of mailboxes.

Louie led me through the door. Inside the foyer he pushed a button.

A disembodied voice answered. "Yeah? Who is it?"

"Louie Lazaro and a buddy of mine."

"Oh, hi, Louie. C'mon up." A buzzer sounded, long and rasping, and Louie opened the unlocked door. From there, it was five steep flights of narrow stairs. By the time we reached the top, I was having trouble catching my breath and Louie was practically in a state of collapse, his breath coming in gasps and his face dripping sweat.

An amiable looking little man greeted us in the fifth-floor hallway and Louie, in between gasping for breath, introduced me. "This is Nick Canzoneri, Chickie. Chickie Wright, Nick. Chickie runs the Counting House for Uncle Joe. I thought you'd like to see it."

I shrugged. "Sure."

Chickie was a little gnome of a man, with wisps of gray hair floating over his balding head and bushy gray eyebrows sprouting from a humorous little face. He was dressed in a dark blue silk shirt, a black-and-white checked vest, and gray flannel trousers. A bright red bow tie and red garters on his sleeves made him look like a parody of a riverboat gambler. He gave us a huge smile and stood aside to usher us through the big, unmarked blue door that had stood half-opened behind him.

"Come right on in," he said expansively. "This is one of the neatest operations in New York City."

That it was. I hadn't known what to expect of a fifth-floor loft called the Counting House, but it certainly wasn't what I found. Chickie took us through, step by step, explaining the entire operation.

"What we've done," he said with obvious pride, "is computerize our bookie and numbers operations."

The entire loft had been turned into a modern, brightly polished business office. At the front, a huge computer bank whirred and clicked, manned by earnest young men in neat business suits who handled the computerized readouts with consummate familiarity. Attractive secretaries worked attentively along the squarely spaced rows of desks, their electric typewriters competing with each other. The place held all the accoutrements of any executive office building.

Chickie waved an expansive hand. "Every numbers bet made below Houston Street is processed here, and every bet on the horses. All the results from the races come in direct by phone, from Arlington in Chicago all the way east. All the money bet is funnelled through here, all records kept, and all payoffs made from here."

I nodded, impressed. "Electronic data processing comes to bookmaking. Very nice!"

Chickie laughed. "Very efficient. We process around eighty thousand dollars a day here. We figure we have to run it like a business. The days of the little guy in the candy store with a notebook in his hip pocket are over."

"How does the Off-Track Betting affect you?" New York's OTB offices around the city had originally been approved by the voters not only as a way of making money for the city and as a convenience to the bettor, but also as a means of driving out the underworld bookie.

Chickie grinned again. He appeared to be a happy man. "It hasn't hurt us much at all, though I was worried about it once, when it first started. People like to deal with an old established firm, I guess, and they're sort of suspicious of a government running a betting operation.

"And of course, we're heavy into numbers, and the government isn't into the numbers game."

"Not yet, anyway," Louie chimed in. "But the way things are going, they probably will be before long." He clapped me on the shoulder. "What do you think, Nick? Pretty slick, isn't it? Uncle Joe may look and act like an old
Mustachio Pete,
but this has got to be the most modern setup in the business."

Louie's ebullience was exceeded only by his naiveté. The Counting House was a step up in underworld organization, but it was hardly the last word. I could show Louie a Mafia-operated communications center in an Indianapolis Hotel that would make New York Telephone look like a PBX switchboard. The results of every gambling event in the country — racing, baseball, basketball, football, you name it — pour into that hotel every day, and then are relayed in microseconds to betting parlors from coast to coast.

Still, the Counting House was an interesting innovation: centralized, organized, efficient. Not bad. "Great," I said. "Terrific!" I tugged at my ear lobe. "I guess you run your trucks business through here, too, huh?"

Louie frowned. "No, but… I don't know, it might not be a bad idea at that. Sort of a central command post, you mean?"

"Right."

Chickie looked a little pained. "Well, we really haven't got a lot of room to spare up here, Louie, to say nothing about how hard it is to get someone you can trust these days."

I had to laugh. He was right up to his throat in underworld business but acting like any office manager in any legit concern… worried that he might have more work to do, or might have to change his ways of doing it. Honest people aren't the only ones who resist change.

"Nick's new in town," Louie explained, "and I thought I'd show him our showcase operation. Anyway, Uncle Joe's going to have Nick and me going over all the operations one of these days, just to see if we can't tighten things up a bit."

"Yeah." Chickie looked dubious.

"We're mostly going to be worrying about security," I said.

Chickie brightened. "Oh, good. I could use some help there."

"You've been having some trouble?" I asked.

He sighed. "Yeah. More than I want. Come in my office and I'll tell you about it."