Floating City (14 page)

Now she was here, in the building where Tinh had rented space, and was not only acquainted with the chief inspector of the Saigon police but was apparently also able to exert absolute influence over him.

Seiko took one step down the stairs, where Van Kiet’s driver was blocking her path. She wore a black-and-turquoise raw-silk tank dress that left her shoulders and most of her legs bare. She was without earrings but wore a wide worked-silver cuff on her left wrist. She looked beautiful and fit and, at the moment, most determined. Her expression was one that Nicholas had never seen on her face before.

The driver looked inquiringly at his superior, who gave him a curt nod. The driver stepped aside.

“Come, Nicholas,” Seiko said, brushing against him as she went past. “You must be exhausted after your long ordeal.”

He wanted to tell her no, that she should just leave, let him be now that he was so close to his goal. She thought she was saving him, but ironically, all she was doing was setting back his investigation, perhaps fatally. But how could he tell her all this with Van Kiet staring at them?

He had no choice. He went past the glum policeman, following Seiko along the corridor. Ahead of him, he could see the brilliant oblong of the open doorway to the street, where bicycles and
cyclos
whizzed past, free as the black birds in the sky.

“Tony thinks you murdered Dominic Goldoni.”

“But you know better, don’t you, Mr. Croaker.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I do.”

Caesare Leonforte poured them both refills from the bottle of Jordan cabernet he had ordered. “There are many advantages to living in California, not the least of which is being so close to the best wine-producing country in America.” He sipped the ruby liquid. “I was brought up on Italian wines and I still love them, but the wines of Napa and Sonoma...” He looked into the glass. “A magnificent achievement! Like the Japanese, really.”

“The Japanese?”

Croaker and Caesare Leonforte were seated in the rear of a trendy TriBeCa restaurant on the west side of downtown Manhattan, just south of Canal Street. No homey checker-clothed table in Little Italy for Bad Clams. The long, narrow room had a vaguely industrial air with its factory windows, exposed pipes, and waiters in black trousers and collarless shirts. The bareness of the cavernous room was mitigated only by a long, sleek cherrywood bar that rose from a polished wood-plank floor that looked old and scarred enough to have once been trod by Herman Melville. Presumably, the MAC-10-toting bodyguards were skulking somewhere out of sight on the pavement.

“In the fifties and sixties,” Leonforte said, “the phrase ‘made in Japan’ was synonymous with cheap junk. California wines also, once upon a time. But now look!” He lifted his glass. “These wines are the envy of the world. And the Japanese economy, well, despite their present problems no one makes a joke about Toyotas, only Cadillacs. I, myself, wouldn’t be caught dead in a Caddy.”

“You’ll pardon my curiosity,” Croaker said, “but how is it you know about me?”

“It isn’t all that difficult if you give it a moment’s thought.” Leonforte waved a hand in the air. “I have access to the same forms of electronic communication as do most branches of what is euphemistically called law enforcement in this country.” He sat back, feeling expansive. And why not? He had just humiliated his rival, run him off his own turf, and snatched someone his intelligence had classified as a federal agent, saving said agent’s life in the process.

“Really? I would have thought most, if not all, of those forms of electronic communication were impenetrable to unauthorized personnel.”

“Who says I’m unauthorized?” Leonforte laughed at Croaker’s stunned look. “Well, okay, so I am unauthorized. Technically speaking. But not everybody thinks so—or cares enough to keep me out. These government people are overworked—”

“And highly underpaid.”

Leonforte grinned. “That’s it precisely, Mr. Croaker. Underpayment is the bane of the bureaucrat’s existence. To understand that is to understand everything about these people.” He spoke about “these people” as if they were a different and inferior form of life. “They move the country along in its business, and gaining their trust or—often more accurately—their interest is one of my prime concerns.”

“Greasing the wheels.” Croaker got some bread and olive oil into his mouth. All the wine was souring his empty stomach. It wasn’t every day you came back from the dead, especially in the company of one of the devil’s disciples.

Leonforte raised a hand, indicating to the waiter that he wanted another bottle. “It’s a fact. Every car can use a lube job now and then, especially the ones that live on low-octane fuel.”

Up close, Croaker could see that Leonforte had a thin scar across one-half of his throat. He made no effort to conceal it; on the contrary, a man like him would be proud of such a mark of what must have been youthful bravado.

“Okay, you know who I am. So what?”

Leonforte waited for the waiter to uncork the bottle and pour a sample of the Jordan into a fresh glass. He waved the waiter away without taking a drink. “So here’s what, Mr. Croaker. What on earth are you doing tailing Margarite Goldoni DeCamillo?”

“You seriously expect me to tell you?”

Now Leonforte took the time to sample the wine. He made a great show of it, then poured for them both. “I’ll tell you something that may shock you. We have someone in common. Dominic Goldoni. We’re both obsessed by him.”

Croaker said nothing, but despite the bread, the cabernet was doing nasty things to his insides.

“Maybe you think I’m full of shit, but if so, you better give the subject another think. Let me tell you something about myself. My father, Francis, God rest his soul, was a man from the old school. What do I mean by that? He was heroic, bigger than life. He was interested in the elemental things in life: money, influence, respect. He also fucked a lot. He took me to a brothel when I was twelve. It was tradition. He watched while me and the whore got it on. Maybe he wanted to instruct me, maybe he just got off on it, who the fuck knows? But from that moment on he considered me a man. Inside of six months he had put a gun in my hand and was training me to shoot, load, break it down even in the dark, very military in some ways, my father.

“Anyway, it was all fucking preparation. For what? Making my bones. ‘You ain’t a man if you don’t make your bones,’ the old man used to say. ‘And if you ain’t a man, you’re nothing.’ He had a fucking point, I’ll tell you.” Leonforte sipped his wine, savoring it as fully as the tale he was spinning.

“So it was my father who told me to kill. Some wiseguy had gotten out of line, passed comments about my father in public. So he was to be killed in public—in the restaurant that was his favorite place, where he felt most secure. ‘I’ll make a statement,’ the old man said, ‘to this man’s friends and to everyone else. They’ll get the point.’

“I was just thirteen then, you understand, but my childhood was already a thing of the past. It’s what my father wanted; it’s what I wanted.” Leonforte looked at Croaker for a moment. “I know you’ve killed men in your time, but I expect you found it difficult. I didn’t. It was like I was a messenger of God, like angels sang on my shoulder.
Bam! Wham!
Blood and brains and clam sauce all over the fucking place, people screaming, the fucking guy’s friends openmouthed or vomiting outright. Christ, the sense of power was like nothing else in the world. And you know something, I wanted to whack them all, everyone at that table, like they were infected because of their association with him. But I controlled myself, dropped the gun and walked out through the madhouse.”

Leonforte, flushed with the residue of absolute power recalled, hunched over the table. “Now here’s the truth of the current situation: Dominic was a fucking genius. I hated his guts, but I’d be a moron if I didn’t admit the fact, at least in private. He was clever enough to keep me at bay even though I had more money, more people, and more resources than he did. He thwarted me every time I tried to go beyond a certain geographical point. I never heard from him directly; there was never even a hint of a confrontation. But in one state a property deal fell through due to a convenient change in local regulations, in another the feds raided a company I was planning to buy, in still another a corporation I spent millions to take over had its assets mysteriously drained days before the signing. Over and over again. I know Dominic was responsible. Now how the fuck did he do that? Inquiring minds want to know, Mr. Croaker, and my mind is exceedingly inquiring.”

“Fascinating. But what does all this have to do with me?”

Leonforte put his glass down with some force. “You want to play hardball, okay, you got it.” That unsettling light in his eyes took on a bestial quality. “He got to you, didn’t he? I mean Dominic. Sure. He had that effect on everyone. You, my friend, tracked down Dominic’s murderer and, so I understand, had a hand in whacking him. You also had a hand where it maybe didn’t belong, mainly in Margarite DeCamillo’s panties, and now you’re hooked but good into the family.” He held up a hand in what was rapidly becoming a signature gesture. “Not that I care; in fact, on one level it’s pretty damn funny. Guys will be guys, right? Hell, it’s another humiliation for him. Man like that must’ve come out of his mother’s ass, you follow me?”

He pointed his finger at Croaker. “But you do that, being who you are and all, it gives us a bad name. It’s an
infamia,
like you insult us to our face, so at the moment I’m a little pissed off at you.”

You and Tony D. That makes two enemies today,
Croaker thought.
Some days it just didn’t pay to wake up.

“On the other hand, I have a weird feeling about Margarite myself. I mean, her brother gets whacked and he leaves the business to a knucklehead like Tony D.? Just because he married into the family? It doesn’t add up. Dominic was too damn smart to make that classic mistake. So what’s the story?” He held up the hand. “So maybe you don’t know, but I’m willing to bet my chadrool that Margarite does. You know I’m on the fucking right path because you’ve had the same notion. Why else are you tailing her and not Tony?

“Margarite was the only one close to Dominic in the years before his death, and she’s one smart cookie, even though she’s handicapped.”

“Handicapped?”

“She’s a woman, schmuck. What would
you
call it?”

Croaker looked away. “I want something to eat.” The two separate people inside Caesare Leonforte were driving him crazy.

Leonforte, smirking uncontrollably, signaled the waiter. “Sure. Why not? That’s why we came here, right?”

He ordered penne with vodka and a green salad. Croaker, whose mood had turned from sour to bitter, opted for the steak frites. Leonforte added another salad for Croaker.

When they were alone again, Leonforte lifted his glass, pointing it in the direction of a young couple who were being shown to a nearby table.

“Look at this putz, staring into her eyes. He looks like a heap of limp linguine. I tell you what, I’d sure like to be across the negotiating table from him this afternoon. He’ll get back to the office, he won’t know whether to say yes or no to anything.”

Leonforte broke off a crust of bread, dipped it into the cabernet, stared at the ruby stain. “Ever since the dawn of time, women have had an evil effect on men.”

“Is that your opinion or a statement of scientific fact?”

Leonforte laughed briefly. “You, my friend, should not be such a skeptic.” He popped the wine-soaked bread into his mouth, chewed reflectively. “Take you and Margarite, for instance. A liaison—a mere dalliance—would not, objectively speaking, be for the worse. But you’ve developed an
attachment.
Now, when you should be clearheaded, your judgment has been impaired. You want to protect her, to be her savior.”

“You know nothing about it.”

The salads came, and Leonforte lit into his with the gusto of a man with a freed id. Croaker took one bite of his and his stomach closed up. He put down his fork.

“Fact is, I know
everything
about it,” Leonforte said between mouthfuls of mâche. “Because I know what goes on between men and women. Men crave power and women crave men who are powerful, that’s the nature of the human condition. End of story.”

He finished off his salad, then used a chunk of bread to wipe up the excess oil and vinegar. He pointed. “You gonna eat that?”

“Help yourself.”

He did, finishing off Croaker’s salad in record time. Then, with a heartfelt sigh, he pushed the plate away. The waiter appeared and cleared the table, setting out silverware for their next course.

Leonforte took some wine. “Look, I can get over the fact that you’re banging Tony D.’s wife because, God help you, I can see you got a real good hard-on for her. But this is a weakness, Mr. Croaker, and now you see why I say that women exert an evil influence over men. You owe me big time, and unlike Tony the weeny ding-a-ling, I am no man to trifle with. You got the inside track with Margarite, and I’m convinced she has in her possession something I want very much.”

Croaker tried to still the heavy beating of his heart. “And what might that be?”

“Dominic’s list. The item that allowed him to intimidate almost everyone in the city, state, and federal governments. Tony D. sure as shit doesn’t have it, so that leaves Margarite. God only knows why she was the only person Dom trusted; no matter how smart she is, she’s only a skirt, no one will pay her any respect.”

The entrées came, and Leonforte started on his penne almost before the waiter had set the large bowl in front of him.

“Here’s the way it is, Mr. Croaker. You’re gonna continue shadowing Margarite. You’re gonna find out what she knows, Dom’s secret, and then you’re gonna give it all to me. Because you work for me now.”

“What if I say no?”

Leonforte looked up, and that red light of madness danced brightly in his eyes, and an awful grin burst out across his face. “Then, Mr. Croaker, I put a bullet through Margarite Goldoni DeCamillo’s brain.”