Operation Bamboozle (28 page)

Jerome Fantoni took the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago and broke his journey there so he could talk a little business with San Giancana. One of the smaller pieces of business was the late Tony Feet. Giancana showed him the bill from the Hotel Lafayette: two silk shirts, a tennis lesson, lobster thermidor with Blanc de Blanc. “We paid the tab. Feet screwed up badly,” Giancana said. “I guess you heard: he got shot with his own gun.”

“Almost a definition of stupidity.”

“Stephanie came to the funeral. Seemed healthy. Happy.”

“This fellow Cabrillo is a bad influence. She follows him everywhere. Now she tells me she wants to marry the DiLazzari boy. She travels three thousand miles for that. Stephanie was the sweetest girl when I was raising her. She looks just like her mother did at that age. I lost her mother and I've lost her. Three thousand miles, Sam. I'd do anything to make her happy. Why did she go three thousand miles?”

“Look at the map, Jerome. She went as far as she could. That's what children do when they stop being children.” Giancana took a long look. Fantoni was blinking, not to hold back tears, but to resolve a puzzle that was far beyond him. Giancana wished he would leave. “What you plan to do in LA?”

“Don't know,” Fantoni said. “First time in my life I don't know what to do.”

He left Chicago on the Super Chief. His private room was soundproofed so that even the occasional wail of the locomotive whistle was soft and comforting. He drank most of a bottle of wine and slept like a child until the telephone woke him. He lay rigid and thought:
There is no telephone here. But I heard it ring. What does that mean?
“You can't reach me here,” he said, huskily. “I don't know what state I'm in.” He groaned. “Cheap puns.” He'd strangle his own mind if only he could lay hands on it.

Vito turned up at Konigsberg, uninvited but with a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. Princess let him in. “If you want to take pot luck,” she said, “my chili con carne improves with age.”

“Con mucho gusto”
Vito said.

Supper was an amiable, affable, edible affair. Nobody shot out the lights, nobody recited his favorite poem, and nobody picked his teeth with his fork. It was a nice, friendly supper, and as boring as doing the dishes.

Afterward, standing in the driveway and admiring a night sky stolen from Tiffany's, Vito said: “I believe in the USA. We fought to get what we've got and we'll fight to keep it. This crusade in Ukraine … You say it's up and running?”

“Our trial run exceeded expectations,” Luis said. “Profit was double what we hoped. Now we need to expand, and for that we need more investors. Private investors, men of vision and
discretion. Government agencies can't get involved—too risky. Deniability is essential.”

“So is freedom,” Vito said.

Up in the hills, the same unhappy coyote howled its miserable complaint. “Ukrainian ambassador,” Julie said. “His lottery ticket didn't come up.”

Vito drove away. Luis and Julie went to bed.

“Is that really where you've been?” she asked. “Blackmailing KGB brass in Ukraine? Faking bucks in Italy?”

“To stop the Red juggernaut swamping the West like a forest fire.” He yawned.

“Mixed metaphor,” she said. “You're sicker than I thought.” She turned out the light.

“He sees me nude every day,” Stevie said. “Why won't he let me see him nude?”

“What can I tell you?” Uncle said. “He makes the rules.”

They were walking from room to room, looking at Vito's collection of paintings.

“If he's got something to hide, he better show me now,” she said, “because I'm gonna see it soon anyway. What I'm
not
gonna do is get hitched to a guy who says I do and turns out he don't. Been down that road three times.”

“Well … I'll talk to him. But I don't think …”

“I want a doctor's certificate. Something official says nothing's missing. They can do a sperm count, can't they? Okay, I want them to count his sperm.”

Uncle found a moment when Vito seemed at ease, and he mentioned Stevie's requirements. He was relieved when Vito smiled.

“That's the very last thing I ever thought I'd hear from you, Uncle. We won't discuss it.” He walked away.

At 1 a.m. not a hell of a lot was happening in LA. Bakers were slinging bread. Milk trucks were on the move, newspapers too. Cops were yawning, doctors were saving or losing lives, only
time would tell which. The occasional night owl was writing a movie script. The rest were asleep, except for Vito DiLazzari II and six young men in an old slaughterhouse between the Greyhound bus depot and the railroad tracks. He was teaching them how to saw up a body so as to make it disposable, using the portable circular saw designed for beef. Uncle watched. “Preparation is crucial,” Vito said. The saw howled as he took a foot off at the ankle. The saw stopped. “Guys spend months planning the biggest bank heist, take a truckload of money, leave nothing. Perfect crime. Are they happy? No, because they're doin' twenty-five to life. Why? Because they didn't plan ahead. No preparation.” He hit the switch, sawed through the leg above the knee, switched off. “Hose,” he said.

One of the young men came forward and washed blood and bits of skin off the pieces. It was a high-pressure hose and it sent the head rolling across the concrete. Vito kicked it back. “Where's best for breakfast?” he asked Uncle.

“I thought Arturo's.”

“His steaks are good. Enough!” The hose stopped. “I don't like sacks. Sacks leak, they got no handles. Not like this garbage bin. Okay, load up.” The young men began dropping the pieces into the bin.

“Hold it,” Vito said. “That's a good shoe. Take off that shoe. Where's the other?” They searched, and found. “Fifty-dollar loafers, nearly new, too good to waste.” He gave the pair to Uncle. “Salvation Army. They take shoes, don't they?”

As they left, Uncle gave a bottle of Scotch to the man who was waiting to lock up. Neither spoke. What was to say?

The bin went into the back of a pickup truck, the men into a car. Twenty minutes later they were rumbling along the incomplete Harbor Freeway. A line of striped poles glinted in the moonlight. They got out and smelled the acid tang of wet concrete.

Two men carried the bin to the edge. “Not there,” Vito said. “That's the fast lane. He belongs in the slow lane.” They moved the bin to the other side, and tipped.

Vito bought breakfast for everybody.

When they got home, Uncle said: “Marco worked for your father since he was a boy. He
built
our protection racket. He was
loyal.”

“He was slow. I got no room for slow.”

“It happens! People get old. Maybe you will, one day. I don't see why you had to whack the old man.”

“Obvious to me. How could I saw him up unless I whacked him first?” Vito was clicking his fingers like castanets. “Speed up, Uncle. Get the lead out.”

Jerome checked into the Silvermine in Beverly Hills, not so much a hotel as a rich man's motel: a scattering of bungalows, each spacious enough and far enough apart to guarantee comfort and privacy. He wanted to be undisturbed so that he could think. Having traveled all the way to Los Angeles he didn't know what to do next.

Go and see Stevie? Instinct told him that wouldn't work. Invite her to meet him, perhaps for dinner? Maybe. Maybe not. Meet for a drink somewhere? Possibly. And if she refused? Oh, Christ. Don't even think of that.

He lay on the bed and examined his life. It was going to hell in a handbasket, a stupid, ancient, obsolete phrase. Well, sometimes he felt old and foolish and pointless. In New Jersey and New York he used to boast that anything in America he wanted could be in his possession within 24 hours. Now suddenly he was out of his depth, out of his realm.

He could ask Cabrillo for help. No. A shameful idea.

That left Vito DiLazzari. The fiancé. Surely the fiancé could act as a go-between? Bring about a reconciliation?

The kid was a punk. The punk was a kid. He ran his Mob like a street gang. He was a disgrace to organized crime. But, here and now, there was nobody else. Jerome heard himself groan. Was that because his teeth had started to ache, or because the thought of meeting DiLazzari gave him chest pains?

Uncle phoned Stevie. “He would like for you to go with him to the cemetery. Dress respectable. No sneakers. No jeans.” She was working on an answer when he hung up. “I got a cute little black shroud,” she told the phone.

Uncle drove. On the way there, Vito told her it was time she learned the family traditions. “Hollywood isn't LA. And forget the oil business. Forget the aircraft factories too, Douglas and Lockheed and North American, that's all new money, it's not the real Los Angeles. The DiLazzaris are old money. We were here before the freeways. Here before the trolley lines, even.”

“Big Red Cars,” Uncle said softly. “Greatest electric railway on earth.”

“Didn't last, did it?” Stevie said. “You tore up the tracks, right? New York got its subway. We're smart.”

“Miles and miles of California poppies every spring,” Vito said. “Dad told me, he paid a nickel for a trolley ticket, picked all the poppies he could carry. DiLazzaris belong here. Old money.”

“I got a three-dollar bill,” she said. “Been in the family since great-granma Fantoni won it off George Washington in a peanuckle game. Is that smog, or am I gettin' all teary-eyed?”

Vito said nothing for about a quarter of a mile. Then: “Mother will be joining us. She says she likes you. Says you got a good figure. She means for child-bearing. The breasts especially. She asks, are they real? See, she really likes you.”

“Oh, sure, we got along fine. On my side, mainly by semaphore.”

Vito rubbed his thumbs against his forefingers, working on the best way to say what he had to say and getting nowhere, so in the end he just said it. “She wants we should make a grandchild for her real soon.”

“Good, we start tonight, she can watch.”

“No jokes,” Vito said. “Family matters are very sacred to mother.”

“Christ, I hope this thing is catered,” Stevie said. “I could murder a steak sandwich.”

Uncle eased the car respectfully into Forest Lawn and let it drift along unhurried driveways that wouldn't know a pothole from a hole in the ground, past manicured hillsides and noble trees, and finally stopped beside a modest mausoleum of dark granite. A matched pair of black Cadillacs was nearby. Vito grunted. Mother had got there first. “No lip,” he warned Stevie. They got out.

Music could be heard. They ducked their heads and shuffled into the chamber. It was candlelit. In a corner, a string quartet was playing a selection of Verdi's Greatest Hits. In the center
was a white marble tomb, covered with red roses, pink carnations and Mrs. DiLazzari. She was sobbing at a volume that would have filled La Scala, Milan. “What the ever-lovin' blue-eyed pink shit is
this?”
Stevie demanded. “Get the hook!”