Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (7 page)

 
          
Two
big Mafia men had got picked up in our area the night before, and Ed and I were
among the six plain- clothesmen assigned to take them downtown this morning.

           
These were really very big important
Mafia people from
New Jersey
, and it was rare to find them actually in the city like this, where we
could get hold of them. One of them was named Anthony Vigano and the other was
named Louis Sambella.

 
          
Nobody
knew if there was going to be any trouble or not. It wasn’t too likely anybody
would try to break them loose from us, but it was just possible some enemies of
theirs might take a shot at them while they weren’t surrounded by their
bodyguards. So a lot of precautions were taken, including transporting them in
two different unmarked cars, with three officers in each car.

 
          
I
was driving one of the cars. I was alone in the front seat, and Vigano was
squeezed in the back seat with Ed on his left and a detective named Charles
Reddy on his right
We
drove downtown without any
incident, and then we had to take them up to a hearing room on the fourth
floor. Arrangement had been made ahead of time, so we were met by a couple of
uniformed cops at the side entrance and taken to an elevator already waiting
for us.

 
          
Vigano
and Sambella were very similar types; heavy-set, florid, their faces fixed in
that expression of contempt that people get when they’ve been bossing other
people around for a long time. They were expensively dressed, but maybe
overdressed, the stripes a little too dominant on their suits, the cufflinks a
little too big and shiny.
And too many rings on their
fingers.
They smelled of after-shave and cologne and deodorant and
haircream, and they weren’t fazed
a
bit.

 
          
Nobody
had said a word all the way down in the car, but now, once we were in the
elevator and headed up for the fourth floor, Charles Reddy suddenly said, “You
don’t seem worried, Tony.”

 
          
Vigano
gave him a casual glance. If it bugged him to be called by his first name he
didn’t show it. He said, “Worried? I could buy you and sell you, what’s to
worry? I’ll be home with my family tonight, and four years from now when the
case is over in the courts I won’t lose.”

 
          
Nobody
said anything back. What was there to say? “I could buy and sell you.” All I
could do was stand there and look at him.

 
          
They
both had the day off, and were at home. There was a birthday party going on in
the kitchen of Joe’s house. It was his daughter Jackie’s ninth birthday, and
the kitchen was crammed with kids and mothers, a lot more of them than the room
could really hold. But nobody seemed to mind. The kids seemed to enjoy being
squeezed in together like that, and the mothers were having a good time
pretending to be working too hard.

 
          
Joe
stood in the kitchen doorway, watching with a little grin on his face. He got a
kick out of the racket and the mess the kids were making, and he also liked
looking at the mothers’ bodies as they moved around trying to keep things
organized. It was a hot day anyway, and the kitchen was small, and everybody
was sweating, and nobody was wearing a lot of extra clothing in the heat. The
women were very sexy moving around, with their hair plastered to their
foreheads and their faces shiny and their dresses wet in the small of the back
and their legs making brushing sounds against each other as they walked.

 
          
Joe
had a little fantasy going in the back of his head, in which he would catch the
eye of one of the mothers and give her a little come-here kind of head gesture,
and she’d come over and say, “What is it?”

 
          
“Telephone,”
he’d say.

 
          
“For
me?” she’d say.

 
          
“Come
take it in the bedroom,” he’d say. (He grinned to himself at that sentence, he
really liked it.)

 
          
So
they’d go into the bedroom and she’d pick up the phone and turn to him a little
confused and say, “There isn’t anybody here.”

 
          
And
he’d grin at her, and maybe wink, and say, “I know. What do you say we rest a
minute?”

 
          
And
she’d grin back, and give him a look, and say, “What do you have in mind, Joe?”

 
          
And
he’d say, “You know what I have in mind,” and he’d put her down on the bed and
fuck her into the basement

 
          
All
of which was going on in the back of his mind, while mainly he was just
standing there, leaning against the doorjamb, getting a kick out of watching
all the kids at their birthday party.

 
          
Tom
came into the house, coming in the front way for once, because he knew the
birthday party was going on in the kitchen and he’d figured Joe would be
staying far away from it. He searched the house, and was surprised at last to
find Joe practically inside the kitchen, standing there in the doorway and
letting the waves of heat and noise roll over him.

 
          
Tom
tugged at his elbow. Joe, enjoying the party and his fantasy, gave him an
irritable look and didn’t move, but Tom made a head gesture meaning
come-with-me-I- want-to-talk. Joe nodded at the kitchen, meaning he wanted to
stay and watch the party, but Tom jabbed his thumb urgently toward the living
room and finally Joe gave up and went with him.

 
          
The
two of
diem
walked into the living room, where it was
a lot quieter, and where Joe said, “Okay, what is it?”

 
          
Excited,
talking in a half-whisper, Tom said, “I’ve got it!”

 
          
Joe
was feeling very irritable. “You got what?”

 
          
Tom
held up one finger and grinned. “Half,” he said. “I’ve got our problem
half-solved.”

 
          
Joe
displayed his irritation by humoring Tom in a heavy-handed way. “Which problem
was that, Tom?” he said.

 
          
“The
heist”

 
          
Suddenly
Joe was frightened of being overheard. “For Christ’s sake!” he said, and looked
over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

 
          
“If
s okay, they can’t hear us with that racket.”

 
          
Joe
hadn’t been thinking about the robbery idea, and he didn’t want to think about
it
To
get it over with, he moved in closer to Tom and
said in a low voice, “All right, what is it?”

 
          
This
time, Tom held up two fingers. He said, “You remember, we decided we needed two
things. Something we could turn over right away for a lot of money, and
somebody with a lot of money to do the buying.”

 
          
Joe
nodded, listening but not really involved. His attention was still back with
the party and his fantasy. Up till now, they’d both enjoyed talking about the
robbery at dull times when there was nothing else to do, like while driving in
to the city to go to work, but it was only a theoretical kind of thing that
they said they were going to do but that neither one of them really intended to
pull off. Now there’d been a change, and the robbery had grown more real to
Tom. That hadn’t happened yet with Joe, so he just nodded, listening with half
of his attention, and said, “Yeah, I remember."

 
          
“I’ve
got the buyer,” Tom said.

 
          
Joe
frowned at him, and didn’t bother to hide his skepticism.
“Who?”

 
          
“The Mafia.”

 
          
“What?”
Joe stared at him. “Are you crazy?”

 
          
“Who
else has two million dollars cash? Who else buys hot goods at that volume?”

 
          
Joe
looked away, gazing across the living room, starting to think about it.
“Christ, Tom,” he said, “they do, don’t
they
?”

 
          
Tom
said, “I told you about those cargo heists on the piers that I worked on that
time. It all went straight to the Mafia. Four million a year, they figured that
was worth.” Joe thought about it, looking for flaws. “But that wasn’t one
robbery,” he said. “That’s over a whole year.”

 
          
“They’re
in the business,” Tom said. “That’s the point.”

           
“All right,” Joe said. “So what do
we sell them?”

           
“Whatever they want to buy,” Tom
said.

 
          
Joe
and I had talked it over and decided together how best to approach the Mafia.
We decided we didn’t want to go through channels, starting with some rank and
file punk on the streets. That way, either we wouldn’t get to the top at all,
or die word would filter out through some informer somewhere along the line,
and we’d be in trouble before we even did anything. Besides, the Mafia is
always talked about as though it’s a business, and in any business, if you’ve
got a problem or a proposition, you should go to the top and leave the clerks
stricdy alone.

 
          
So we decided the thing to do was make our pitch directly to
Anthony Vigano.
He was, as he’d said he would be, out on bail, so it
should be better if just one of us approached him, and since it had been my
idea in the first place I was the one who would go. Also, Joe didn’t feel very
much like doing it. It wasn’t his kind of thing.

 
          
There
were files on Vigano downtown, and because of my identification I had simple
and easy access to the files. They included Vigano’s address, over in Red Bank,
New
Jersey
,
plus a lot of other information about the things he’d been involved with over
the years. He’d spent eight months in jail when he was twenty-two years old,
for assault with a dangerous weapon. Other than that, he had more arrests than
I had hairs on my head, but no convictions. He’d been a union officer a few
times in his life, and he had an import-export business for a while, and he was
a major stockholder in a
New Jersey
brewery, and he was a part-owner of a trucking company down in
Trenton
. The arrests had involved drugs and
extortion and receiving stolen goods and bribery and just about every crime on
the books except playing hookey. There had even been two attempts to get him on
income-tax charges, but he’d wriggled out of both of them, too.

 
          
There
had been three attempts on his life over the years, the last one nine years
before, in
Brooklyn
. He traveled with bodyguards, one of which
had been killed that time in
Brooklyn
,
and so far he didn’t have a scratch on him. And apparently there hadn’t been
any more internal disputes since the
Brooklyn
incident.

 
          
His
place in Red Bank was an estate near the shore there, a full square block
surrounded by a high iron fence and eight-foot-tall hedges. I got the Chewy and
drove over to New Jersey and took a spin around the place once, by day, just
checking it out, and through the closed iron gates you could see the black-top
road curving in through crew-cut lawn with big oak trees on it, and leading
over to a three-story high brick mansion with white trim and four white pillars
on the front. There were two or three expensive-looking cars parked in front of
the house, and a casual-looking guy dressed like a gardener was hanging around
just inside the iron gates.
Gardener, hell.

 
          
A
part of our thinking in this situation all along had been that in our position
we could get supplies for the robbery right from the force itself, from the
Police Department, and now for the first time we put that idea into effect.
There’s a room upstairs at the precinct full of disguises, including dresses
and false stomachs and all kinds of things; I went up and checked out a moustache
and a wig and a set of hom-rim glasses with clear lenses. Then I turned over
all my identification to Joe, and took the train down to Red Bank. The idea was
,
I wanted to visit Vigano without him being able to return
the favor.

 
          
I
took a cab from the station to Vigano’s place. If the driver knew anything
about the address, he gave no sign of it. I paid him, got out of the car,
waited for him to drive away, and then walked over to the gate.

 
          
Somebody
inside the gate suddenly flashed a light in my eyes. I put my forearm up to
block it, and said, “Hey! You don’t have to blind me.”

 
          
A
voice said, “Whadya want?” It was a gravel voice, the kind you make with pizza
and cigars.

 
          
I
kept my forearm up. I didn’t want all that light on my face out here. I said,
“Get that God damn light out of my eyes.”

 
          
It
took him a couple of seconds longer; then he lowered the flashlight beam till
it was aimed at about my belt- buckle. I still couldn’t see anything past it,
but at least it wasn’t blinding me. And it wasn’t showing my features big and
clear to anybody observing.

 
          
He
said, “I still want to know what you want.”

 
          
I
lowered my forearm. “I want to see Mister Vigano,” I said. I was suddenly
feeling very nervous. I was here without any of the protection I usually carry.
Not so much the gun, as the status of being a police officer.

 
          
He
said, ‘‘I don’t recognize you.”

 
          
I
said, “I’m a
New York City
cop, with a proposition.”

 
          
He
said, “We don’t take defectors.”

 
          
“A
proposition, that’s all,” I said. “I’m willing to go see somebody else.”

 
          
Nothing
happened for maybe ten seconds, and then all of a sudden the light went out.
Now I couldn’t see anything at all. “Wait there,” the voice said, and footsteps
went away.

 
          
After
a minute or so my eyes adjusted to the dark again, and I could make out lights
in the house inside there. I didn’t know if there was anybody standing inside
the gate or not.

 
          
I
waited nearly five minutes. That gave me plenty of time to come to the
conclusion that I was an idiot. What the hell was I doing here in the first
place? This whole robbery thing was just something Joe and I talked about in
the car, going into the city and going home. Sometimes we talked and thought as
though we were serious about it, but were we? Was I really going to steal something
and collect a million dollars and go live in
Trinidad
? That’s just daydreams.

 
          
The
reason I became a policeman is because I wanted a civil-service job. I took a
couple of the state civil-service exams, and I became a clerk in an
Unemployment Insurance office in
Queens
, and
one day when I had nothing to do I read a police-recruiting poster on the
billboard in the office. The idea I got from the poster was that being a
policeman combined civil service with a little bit of glamour or excitement.
The clerk job was too boring to put up with any more, so I switched over. And
the poster didn’t lie. Being a policeman is exactly that; civil service plus
excitement.

 
          
But
I don’t
know,
the last few years everything seems to
be going to hell. Sometimes I think it’s just me getting older, but other times
I look around and I notice everybody else has the same attitude. Like
New York
is getting crappier by the
second,
and money is getting tighter, and everything is just
more tense and troubled and futile than it used to be.

 
          
It’s
been coming this way for a long
time,
I don’t mean
this is any sudden change. I mean, the reason I moved my family out to
Long Island
eleven years ago was because already by
then
New
York
was a place where you didn’t want to bring up your children. Everybody else
moved out then too. We all knew the city was getting impossible, we all freely
admitted to one another that we were moving out because of the kids.

 
          
Well,
now the city
is
impossible. It isn’t
even a place for adults any more. I hate driving in there every workday, I
don’t even like to look in that direction. But what am I going to do? You get
married, you have kids, you commit yourself to a mortgage on a house, payments
on the car and the furniture; all of a sudden there aren’t any more decisions
you can make. I couldn’t decide tomorrow morning to stop being a
New York City
cop. Give up my seniority, my civil-service
status? Give up my years toward the pension? And where would I find another job
at the same pay? And would it be any better?

 
          
You
go along and go along, and it seems as though you’re running your own life, and
it never occurs to you that your life has gradually closed around you like a
Venus flytrap and
it’s
running you.

 
          
During
this whole period of time, while the idea of the robbery was still theoretical,
I found myself remembering over and over what that hippie pusher had said,
about all of us having started out different from this. It’s true. I'd find
myself sometimes doing things, or saying things, or just thinking things, and
Fd
suddenly look around at myself and not believe it was me.
If I could have looked ahead when I was ten years old to the man I was going to
turn out to be, would I have been pleased?

 
          
And
I just have this vague feeling that it isn’t necessary, that this isn’t who I
have to be. Joe and me both, my partner Ed, all of us, we’ve narrowed ourselves
down,
we’ve made ourselves blunt and tough because
that’s the only way to survive. But what if we were in a different kind of
setting? Even that hippie was a ten-year-old kid once. But we all of us get
together in that city like hungry animals jammed in together in a pit, and we
beat on each other because that’s all we know how to do, and after a while all
of us have turned ourselves into people you don’t want to bring your kids up
among.

 
          
So
you sit in the car on the way to work, and you fantasize a million-dollar
robbery, life in a
Caribbean
island, out and away from all this lousy
stuff. They make movies about robberies, and people go to them and love them.
Or watch them when they show up on television.
And every once
in a while somebody tries it in real life.

 
          
A
flashlight was coming down the drive from the house. I tensed up, seeing it
come. I could still turn around and walk away from this, let it stay in the
land of fantasy. I think it was only the idea of facing Joe that kept me from
doing it.

 
          
There
were several people behind the
flashlight,
I couldn’t
be sure how many. The flashlight didn’t point at me at all now; first it
pointed at the ground, and then it pointed at the gate as it was being
unlocked. A voice said “Come in.” It wasn’t the gravel voice from before, but a
different one, smoother, oilier.

 
          
I
stepped in, and they shut the gate behind me. I was frisked, fast and expert,
and then hands held my arms just above the elbows and I was walked up to the
house.

 
          
I
didn’t get to use the front entrance. They took me around the side and into an
entrance with snow shovels and overcoats and overshoes in the small room
inside. We went through that into an empty kitchen, and they frisked me again,
more thoroughly, going through all my pockets. There were three of them, and
two searched me while the other stood off a ways behind me. They were dressed
in suits and ties, but they were unmistakably hoods.

 
          
When
they finished with the second search, one of the friskers went out of the room
The
other two and I waited. I looked around the kitchen,
which was like the kind you see in a fairly small restaurant. Big
chopping-block table in the middle, with copper pans hanging from racks over
it.
Stainless-steel ovens and grill and sinks.
Apparently Mr. Vigano did a lot of entertaining.

 
          
It
had occurred to me there was a possibility Mr. Vigano might decide to kill me.
I couldn’t think of any reason for him to do it, but I couldn’t discount the
possibility. I admired the kitchen rather than think about that.