The Big Scam (13 page)

“What's that in today's money?” Dellaporta asked impatiently.

“There are some variables, like how much of it was gold or diamonds, which have increased at different rates, but the general figures that are thrown out are”—Ida hesitated for effect—“thirty to fifty million.” Everyone groaned. “So after they bury it, Rosenkranz, who's not the smartest guy in the world, decides he'd better draw a map so he can find it again. But he's got a big mouth, and eventually Dutch hears that he's been talking about it. He tells Lulu to give the map to his next in command. And who's third in command? Marty Krompier.” Remembering the name from Joseph Baldovino's ledger, the room began buzzing again. “Now on”—Ida checked one of the pages—“October tenth, nineteen thirty-five, the Dutchman, Lulu, a guy they call Abba Dabba Berman, and Abe Landau are sitting in the back room of the Palace Chop House in Newark tallying up the weekly receipts. In walk two guys, one named Bug Workman, and they wind up shooting all four of them. At the same time Marty Krompier, who was Schultz's chief enforcer for the Harlem numbers, and some of his people, are ambushed in a barbershop in Manhattan.”

“Just like in
The Godfather,”
Tatorrio said. “Taking care of all the family's enemies at once.”

“Just like in
The Godfather,
but thirty years before the book was written,” Ida said.

“There's a book?” Dellaporta asked.

“Now Krompier is hit bad, and his brothers Jules and Milton had to give him blood transfusions. But he still doesn't know if he's going to make it, so he tells Milton about the map and that he should hold on to it for Dutch. See, at the time he didn't know Schultz had been shot.”

“What happened to it then?” Parisi asked.

“That's where the story ends. There was one rumor that some unnamed gangsters got it after killing some of the Dutchman's men. That's the last anyone ever heard of the map.”

“So the last thing we know for sure is that Milton Krompier had it.”

Ida smiled as if about to pull one last rabbit out of the hat. “Did you know that you can trace your family tree on the Internet, for generations and generations?” Everyone just looked at him with a blank stare. “Yeah, the librarian showed me how to do it. Something the Mormons started.”

“Probably so they could keep track of all their wives,” Tatorrio offered.

“So I plugged in the name Anthony Luitu. And guess who his parents were—Ruth and Milton…”

“Krompier,” Parisi answered. Dellaporta slapped Manny on the back.

“That's right.”

Tatorrio asked, “How come Luitu had a different last name?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” Ida said. “Turns out he was adopted by the Krompiers, but he was older, so he just kept his name.”

“That's great, Tommy, but we've only got half the map. And unfortunately, the Feds have the other half.” The mood of the room darkened instantly. For Parisi, the most surprising part of becoming a captain was the emotional volatility of his crew. They were incapable of stepping back from an obstacle and looking for a way around it, preferring to judge the situation by its ability to provide, or prevent, immediate gratification. If denied, an alternative solution was never sought, and a brief lapse into dejection ensued until that, too, required too much effort. Then it was on to the next elusive scheme. The only exception was Tommy Ida. Had it been up to anyone else to research the possibility of the treasure's existence, the entire mini-drama would have likely been forgotten. More than ever, Parisi now understood why someone had to be in charge. For a few seconds, he watched Ida, who was carefully rereading one of the pages he had brought back from the library, making notes in the margin. “Let me take another look at the map, Manny. Gus, do you still have that jeweler's loupe?”

“It's out in the car. I'll get it.”

Ida looked up. “Like I was saying, when Schultz and his crew got shot, they were adding up the weekly take from the numbers. After the shooting, the cops got the figures and made them public. Get this—the gross for seven weeks was recorded as $827,253 and the net was $148,369. And that was just on the numbers. So he obviously was making the kind of money that could have accumulated to $7 million.”

Parisi had written the figures down. “Man, that's a lot of overhead. If I turned over that low a percentage, the don would have me shot for skimming.”

Dellaporta returned and handed the jeweler's loupe to Parisi.

Manny said, “See that X there, Mike, that must be where it is.”

Parisi looked at it through the lens. It was drawn right next to the torn edge. “There's a small line that starts on the left side of the X and disappears off the edge. It must be something to help show exactly where the box is buried.” Everyone became silent with disappointment.

Finally Dellaporta said what everyone was thinking. “And the FBI has the other half, and they don't have a clue.”

“Hey, who knows, we might get lucky. Let's go out there and give it a shot,” Manny said. “What do you say, Mike?”

Parisi looked around at the defeated faces. “What the hell, why not? Tommy, how long to drive up there?”

Ida closed his eyes while he calculated. “Two, two and a half hours.”

“So, Manny, what do you think? Think this is for real?” Parisi asked.

“You know I ain't the smartest guy in the world, but my father was no dummy. He didn't die of natural causes because he misread people and situations. If he bought Luitu's story, I'd say it's worth checking out.”

“Then let's ride.”

“Now?” Dellaporta asked. “There won't be much daylight left.”

“We'll stay over.”

“Where?”

“It's the Catskills, right? Aren't they famous for their hotels? The Dutchman must have had some reason for going up there other than digging a hole.”

“YOU KNOW I DON'T LIKE TO GO INTO THE OFFICE,
especially with the inspectors in town. Have you forgotten the squad battle cry:
‘Way
out of sight,
way
out of mind'?” Howard Snow asked. “Can't you go up there by yourself?”

“I need you to stand guard,” Jack Straker answered.

“Stand guard
…stand
guard,”
he said again, changing the accent to the second word, tipping his head in the opposite direction. “You know, Jack, it just doesn't have that keep-your-job ring to it.”

With the mock impatience of an adult trying to teach a lesson by repetition, Straker looked up at the Bureau garage ceiling. “Tell me how much money you have left until payday.”

“I already told you.”

“Tell me again because evidently you weren't listening to your half of the conversation.”

“Eighteen dollars.”

“Eighteen dollars. Now, do you want to wait to payday to get laid, or do you want to get laid tonight?”

Snow looked away, his left hand tracing the square of his belt buckle. “Tonight.”

“Hey, Howard, it's nothing to be ashamed of. We all want to get laid tonight. Did you ever hear a guy say, You know, I think I'll wait until the fifteenth or, if not then, maybe the twenty-eighth? There's only one answer to the question, and it's ‘Right now, sweetheart.' ”

“This Megan, she's cute?”

“Now the serial virgin is being picky,” Straker said. “Have you ever met a Megan who wasn't cute? And by closing time I guarantee she'll be gorgeous. In the meantime, we have to show them we can commit, at least to dinner and drinks, and eighteen dollars won't even get us drive-through privileges.
Now
have we had this conversation for the last time?”

“Sometimes I think you're in love with chaos.”

“I'm in love with the possibility of chaos, that things
could
go wrong, but I don't like it any better than you when they actually do.”

“How in love are you with this scam?”

“As long as I have a trusted lookout, this can't go wrong.”

“…said Nixon to the Watergate burglars.”

“I hope you're this funny with Megan.”

As they rode the elevator up to the FBI office, Straker could see that the lure of flesh, which would have overpowered most men's fear, still hadn't captivated Snow. “Do you know why it is absolutely imperative that you get laid tonight?”

“This should be interesting.”

“I'm serious. Do you know why that inspector's attempt to flip you is bothering you so much?” Snow looked at him with exaggerated apathy, as if there was only one chance in a million that he would find the evidence Straker was about to offer convincing. “The longer a man goes without getting laid, the more likely he is to be swallowed by his own fear. You probably don't remember this, but when you're freshly laid, you don't give a good goddamn about anything. That's because it's the one thing that truly validates us as men. That's why we think about it constantly. I guarantee you that by tomorrow morning you'll be ready to go in there and kick that inspector's nuts up into his sinus cavities.”

“And I was worried about keeping my job.”

The elevator doors opened. “Is your radio on?” Straker asked. Snow reached under his jacket and turned on the small radio attached to his belt and twisted the tiny receiver into his ear. Straker stepped out of the elevator and said, “I think the evidence room is this way.”

“How did you know this stuff was even here?”

“I know a guy on the squad that seized all of it last month.”

“How does someone who gets paid to enforce the law come up with an idea like this?”

“See, Howie, that question proves how badly you need some leg. Trying to divide the world into lawbreakers and law enforcers is, to me, a fairly obvious symptom of being, shall we say, seminally overloaded. You're trying to control the world around you by neatly arranging everyone into categories. To think that by joining the FBI you've surrounded yourself with only good guys is more than naïve, it's grand-theft denial. I hate to break this to you, but there is no moral backpack issued with your credentials. The only thing that separates us from them is a roll of the dice. Don't kid yourself. The whole thing is nothing more than a game of shirts and skins.”

Straker stopped at a door and knocked quietly. An attractive dark-haired woman, no more than twenty, opened it and smiled at him. “Jenny, this is Howard.” She started to say hello, but he playfully pushed her back inside before she could finish. The door closed behind them, extinguishing her giggles.

Snow leaned against a wall and tried to look inconspicuous in the deserted office. Suddenly, his radio came to life. Straker had switched his on and was evidently leaving the mike open.

Since teaming up with him, Snow had studied all his mannerisms and expressions along with the other iconoclastic quirks that gave Straker his magic, a pursuit that had all the wonder and disappointment of a college class that had promised to change one's approach to life. The first lesson he learned was that no man could copy another man's life, especially when it came to the more desirable of Jack's “talents,” like what was going on right now in the evidence room. He was not Jack Straker, but that didn't mean he couldn't become a better Howard Snow by hanging around him.

Decoding Jack's motives was a rambling puzzle he had come to enjoy trying to solve. He considered the open mike, hoping the exercise would shorten the wait. A few possibilities presented themselves. First, it was not an accident that the radio was broadcasting. Despite all the travails Straker had managed to stack in his personnel file like dry firewood, incompetence was never their cause. When something difficult or even dangerous needed to be done, he was the individual who stepped forward or was simply expected to handle it. Like the Dimino chase. Snow couldn't imagine doing the driving. It was all he could do just to hold on. Straker had done it with a casual eagerness. And then, of course, there was the Shot.

Of the millions of rounds that had been fired by agents in the history of the agency, whether in training or actual combat, only one was known as the Shot. Snow first heard about it years before he met Jack Straker and his celebrity had traveled the well-rutted road from legend to infamy to obscurity. Firearm instructors at Quantico invariably cited it as an example not only of exceptional marksmanship, but also of how an agent must be able to adapt to changing situations.

Straker's first year, he was assigned to the Los Angeles office. One day a lone gunman smuggled a small pistol through security at the Minneapolis airport and took over a plane. He demanded half a million dollars, ordered the pilot to fly to Los Angeles, and told them to have the money and a getaway car waiting. The LA office scrambled every available agent and directed them to a hangar at the airport until a course of action could be decided upon. Instead of driving straight to LAX, Straker, seized by some never-explained prescience, went back to the office first and took a sniper's rifle from the gun vault. By the time he got to the airport, the plane was landing, so he worked his way as close to the runway as possible and waited.

And waited. One of the most amazing facets of the Shot, according to the Quantico instructors, was how long Straker had maintained a sight picture through the scope. It was estimated that he kept his eye on the scope for more than twenty minutes. Snow knew from weapons training how quickly the eye becomes exhausted. That Straker maintained his bead that long was a remarkable feat of human willpower. Especially now that Snow knew how completely foreign self-control was to Straker.

When the hijacker finally came down the stairs, he shielded himself with a stewardess. They were more than a hundred yards away from the tip of Straker's muzzle and heading toward a car that was less than thirty. Fortunately it was not between Straker and the gunman. Ten yards from the car, the stewardess's heel caught in the tarmac and she stumbled to one knee. The single shot caught the hijacker under the right armpit. As the stewardess got up, he fell to his knees and reached blindly toward her, but, as she commented later, death had already taken his eyes. He collapsed onto his face.

With predictable bureaucratic high camp, the first-year agent was chewed out for the dozen or so violations of FBI procedure, not the least of which was bypassing the SAC's ego. Then the director of the FBI called. First he congratulated the SAC on such a quick, decisive resolution to an extremely difficult situation. Next he asked to talk to the agent who had killed the hijacker. After Jack hung up, the SAC continued his assault. When Straker stood up to leave, the agent in charge asked where he thought he was going. “To Quantico,” he said. “I've just been made a firearms instructor.”

But by that time, all new agent classes had women in them, and it wasn't long before the man who had fired the Shot, according to one of his fellow firearms instructors, “became better known for his swordsmanship than his marksmanship.” Within a year, he was discreetly transferred to New York.

So whatever Straker's reason was for leaving his mike open, Snow knew it wasn't accidental. Possibly it was to keep Snow alert at his post, but Snow could not sound a warning because a radio cannot receive when it's transmitting. More likely its purpose was to engorge Snow's fantasies, to keep him focused on the evening's eventual prize. He listened more closely, but most of the words were indistinguishable, or maybe he just cared less about them than about the grunting and groaning that seeped into his earpiece. He smiled and shook his head.

Then the most probable reason came to him. Jack Straker, as he had done almost since the moment the two had met, was including Snow in his life. Why, Snow could not imagine. He reached under his jacket and turned off the radio.

Fifteen minutes later, the door to the evidence room opened and Straker squeezed out, carrying something weighty in an oversized brown paper bag. He leaned back inside and Snow could see Jenny's face as Straker kissed her good-bye. Spotting Snow down the hall, she stuck her head out, and he could see that she was naked. She waved coyly and he waved back, not as embarrassed as he would have imagined. He pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose to sharpen their focus.

Neither man said anything until they were in the elevator. “See anything interesting?” Straker asked.

“Do you mean before the door opened?”

“She is a doll, huh?”

“She is a doll.”

“Hear
anything interesting?”

Snow said, “I don't suppose she knew the mike was open.”

“Hey, it was her idea. She thinks you're cute.”

An hour later, the two men walked into Liberty Loan in Queens. The pawnshop's owner, Sam Kasdan, looked up from his newspaper to appraise his latest customers. The short one didn't look particularly bright, and the taller one with an unkempt ponytail hanging out the back of his baseball cap was carrying a glass bowl that had the delicate silhouette and colors of a style that had not been made in almost a hundred years. Dried around the rim was what appeared to be paint, as though someone had used the bowl to clean brushes. Inside sat a couple of handfuls of silver dollars. That these guys were using the bowl to transport the abrasive coins indicated that they had no idea of its value. They had an air that Kasdan recognized—desperation mixed with the stink of low-income impulsiveness.

Kasdan came to the counter. “Hi, how are you?”

Straker pulled the baseball cap down a little farther. “You buy silver dollars, right? The sign says coins, they're coins, right?” He set the bowl on the counter.

“Yes, we do.”

“Well, I need to sell these, I mean I'm thinking about selling them. You know, if the price is high enough.” He looked around the shop to avoid eye contact.

The pawnbroker smiled professionally. “Fair enough.” Had he wanted to waste a little time, he could have gotten him down to a dollar apiece for the coins. He obviously needed money. People did not come to a pawnbroker expecting a fair deal. The trade-off was that the money was immediately available. The pawnbroker had to make a profit somehow, but it was the customer's job to try to minimize it.

Possibly these coins were stolen, and if so, the ponytail would have no other place to sell them unless he wanted to risk going to a bank—with its surveillance cameras.

“Do you mind if I take a look at them?”

“No, go ahead.” Straker lit a cigarette. “All right if I smoke?”

“Sure.” Kasdan picked up one of the coins. It was in fair condition, with normal wear for a circulated silver dollar. “Mind if I ask you where you got them?”

“Ah, my mother died a ways back. She was a waitress. She collected them for years.”

Now the pawnbroker was fairly convinced that the coins were stolen. The two men didn't look like junkies, but he couldn't always tell. “That's too bad, you have my condolences.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Straker's fingers started tapping the counter. “So what are they worth?”