City of War (21 page)

“I wasn’t asleep. Is something the matter?”

I heard another voice behind him. A woman’s. Mallory has a Danish girlfriend, Jannicke Thorsen, who’s in her fifties and drop-dead stunning. She runs a fur import business, which has earned her a prominent position on PETA’s blood-splash list, but she just shrugs and goes on with her life.

Her primary office is in Copenhagen, but when she’s in L.A., she stays with us. It’s a big house, and I’m glad for Mallory. I also like having her around. She doesn’t get jokes, but she’s a wonderful conversationalist, and she always brings Danish sausages. None better.

I said to Mallory, “Tell Jannicke I’m thinking about a full-length sable for après shower.”

I heard Mallory talking to her. “She says to call her next time you’re bathing, and she’ll come up and do the measuring herself.”

I laughed. “Sorry to interrupt your evening, Don Juan, but I want you to leave the house.”

“Tonight?”

“As soon as you can throw a few things in a suitcase.”

“May I ask why?”

Suddenly I heard Jannicke’s lilting Danish accent. “There it is again.”

I said to Mallory, “There’s
what
again?”

“We heard a noise out by the gate. I was just on my way outside to check when you called.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. I almost shouted, “Don’t go outside!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Where are you?”

“In the den, playing the new Grand Theft Auto. The graphics are incred…”

I cut him off. “Listen to me. Take Jannicke and go upstairs right now. Use the back stairway. And bolt yourself in my bedroom.”

“I don’t under…”

I heard the sound of crashing glass. Then Jannicke screamed. I yelled into the phone, “Mallory!”

Through the open line, there was shouting, then running feet on wooden stairs. Jannicke screamed again. More shouts, then a door slammed, and a loud click. A dead bolt flying home.

“Mallory, are you there?”

He was out of breath, but he answered. “We’re here. Who the devil are these people?”

I could hear them beating on the bedroom door.

“How many are there?”

“Two, sir.”

From the sound through the phone, Tino and Dante were using something heavy and metal to try to get in. I guessed
sabers from the Toledo Room. The door was four inches of solid oak reinforced with steel, but it wasn’t impregnable.

“Mallory, listen. The elevator. Go to the garage. How’s your driving, Sport?”

“If I take the Morgan, it’ll be as good as when I was sixteen.”

“Be sure to activate the front gate before you open the garage.”

I heard the elevator door close and the motor begin to whir. I said, “The good news is that if they were going to shoot you, they already would have.”

“How comforting,” Mallory answered as only a British retainer could.

“Get out of L.A. Go to San Diego, San Francisco, Vegas. Park the car in a downtown garage, and take a cab to the airport. Does your sister still live in Florida?”

“Yes, Palm Beach.”

“Then go there. Take Jannicke.”

“After the last few minutes, I’m not so sure she’ll…”

I listened as he got into the Morgan and revved it. I heard the garage door slide open. Then shouts, followed by the sound of screeching tires. I got a mental picture of the Englishman hunched over the wheel, Jannicke, beside him, blonde hair flying.

A few moments later, I heard Mallory shout over the wind, “We’re out, sir. Haven’t had this much excitement in years. And Jannicke says she’s never been to Florida.”

Just before he clicked off, he said, “And Mr. Black, I don’t really think you’re a schmuck.”

17

State Department on the Pacific

The next morning, Brittany came over to take Archer shopping. Archer had gotten up early and laundered her jogging gear. When she put it back on, it showed off her long, athletic body, and I told her so.

“Thanks,” she said. “You don’t get that many compliments when you run at night.” She pointed to her bad eye behind the Ray-Bans. “I like to keep from scaring kids.”

She’d slept in one of the two spare staterooms and looked completely rested. “I never knew I could sleep so soundly.”

“Sea air,” I said.

“Gotta take a bottle home.”

I told Brittany to get Archer whatever she wanted, and we’d settle up later. By the time they left, they were chatting away like they’d known each other all their lives. Another thing women are better at than men.

After Brittany started down the stairs, she stopped and came back. She stood on her tiptoes and pulled my face down to hers. Then she kissed me on the cheek. “Bert told me about your conversation. Thanks, Rail.”

“You’re welcome.”

“He’s with a real estate guy right now putting the warehouse on the market. Afterward, we’re never going to be apart again.” There were tears in her eyes.

I made some phone calls, then went up to the club. I found Emilio Rodeo in the kitchen ordering his underlings around like a Prussian drill sergeant with a Spanish accent. He used to cook at Horchow in Madrid, the survivor of the old Berlin eatery, so Emilio’s menu sometimes looks like he can’t decide whether to flamenco or invade France. When he saw me, he came over, and we walked into the empty dining room.

“I need some provisions.”

“Ingredients or prepared meals?”

“Prepared. I’m dangerous around fire.”

“So I’ve heard. Mallory mentioned you ruined an entire set of cookware trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich. Too bad he didn’t get film.”

“Good luck to him if he asks for another vacation.”

Emilio chuckled. “What do you need?”

“Say, breakfast and lunch for five days. Dinner we can have out.”

“How many people?”

“Two.”

He smiled. “A little cruise to nowhere?”

“Who knows, maybe we won’t leave the dock.”

Emilio liked that. “Consider it done. This afternoon okay?”

“Sure.”

As I climbed back aboard the boat, my phone rang. It was Benny Joe. “I got your voice mail. The guy you want is Jacques Benveniste. He was born on that fuckin’ island you’re so interested in. But when I was talkin’ to him he called it somethin’ else.”

“Corse,” I offered.

“Yeah, that’s it. Corse. What the fuck? Either speak American, or shut the fuck up. Jackie used to be the State Department’s organized crime guy in the Med. Smart as
they come but not one a them fuckin’ Ivy League dorks who tells you where he went to school before you’re done shakin’ hands. Ole Miss guy. So he won’t be lecturin’ you about how Karl Fuckin’ Marx had some good ideas, but there just aren’t enough Harvard PhD’s to get the word out. Goes by Jackie. No fuckin’ shit, I would too if my parents had laid Jacques on me. Fuckin’ frogs.”

“Benveniste? Small book. Corsican Jews.”

“Whoa, what’s that you’re always fuckin’ preachin’ about stereotypin’?”

“You mean like Ivy League dorks? Not the same thing, but nice try. How do I reach him?”

“Happens he’s retired some fuckin’ place out here. Dana Point. You know it?”

“Just down the road.”

“Then get a fuckin’ pen.”

I parked the silver Escalade I’d rented at the end of the cul-de-sac on Mercator Isle Drive. A sixtyish Jackie Benveniste sporting a salt-and-pepper ponytail opened the door of his gated, 1950s bungalow. He was dressed in yellow swim trunks and a purple Lakers jacket, sleeves pushed up. Jackie was linebacker-sized and going paunchy, but it looked like under the layer of good living, there was still some steel. Peeking out from behind him was a good-sized fawn boxer with four white paws.

“Meet Annie,” he smiled. “Seventy pounds of please-love-me.”

I bent down and the dog came to me, head down, wriggling everything at once. I scratched her behind the ears, and we were friends for life. Except for Benny Joe’s Dobermans, animals and kids always seem to like me. The rest of society…spotty.

Jackie said he was just hosing down the back patio, and I followed him and Annie through the house, which was crammed with stuff accumulated from a career spent over
seas. Jackie, barefoot, walked with a slight side-to-side motion, which he explained over his shoulder as, “Para-trooper knees and maybe crawling out of one too many bars.” I liked the guy immediately.

The back of the house was solid glass, and when we stepped onto the patio, the view of the Pacific was so spectacular that it took me a second before I noticed the small, sunken spa off to the right, where a very buxom, very naked young lady lounged unself-consciously.

“Meet Nancy,” Jackie said, and Nancy smiled and waved. “This retirement shit should start when you’re seventeen,” he said and laughed.

Niguel Shores, a half-moon, terraced cove rising along the Pacific, was once the playground for aerospace engineers working at firms along the Orange Coast. They built their modest weekend retreats on this remote stretch of beach, partied hard and talked shop. In their backyards, over burgers and Pabst and sometimes a little wife-swapping, they planned space missions and invented breakthrough aircraft.

If you were a Soviet spy in those days, the very best duty on the planet was being asked to infiltrate this community of SoCal engineers. It was one of America’s finest hours, and one nobody took the time to record.

The few remaining pioneers, now heading into the sunset, have watched their five-thousand-dollar lots appreciate to $3 million or more, which means the biggest thing they have to worry about is wiping up the drool when their heirs come to visit. Some of the homes that have been torn down and replaced reach into eight figures.

Jackie’s was one of the unimproved ones. He said it was owned by a Lockheed Skunk Works widow who had recently gone into assisted living but wouldn’t let the place be sold until she was dead. “Said she needed to be able to dream about coming home, even if she wasn’t going to be able to. You’d fall over if you knew the rent I was paying. She thought I reminded her of her husband.”

I looked out at the 180° view of the ocean, broken only by three palm trees further down the hill, and asked if he’d gotten an option to buy.

“On State Department retirement pay? Shit, why break my own heart. I’m just hoping she has a long, happy stay in the home.”

He turned off the hose, and we sat in a couple of comfortable deck chairs on either side of a teak table facing the water. Two hundred yards in the distance and seventy-five feet down, breakers thundered against the wide, deserted beach. Annie curled up next to her master and went to sleep. There was an icy pitcher of lemonade on the table, and Jackie poured us each a glass. I took a sip. Good.

“Benny Joe said you need some info. Want me to send Nancy inside?”

I looked over at the young lady, oblivious to us, playing with a water jet. “I don’t think she’s much of a security risk.”

Jackie chuckled. “I sure as hell hope not. No telling what I’ve said.”

I went through everything that had happened, leaving out nothing. When I finished, he pointed to a long one-story house further down the cliff. “See that place?”

I nodded.

“They were on Egypt Air 990. Lifetime dream to see the Pyramids. Everybody says they were wonderful people. Yet here I sit, a guy with no right to be alive, enjoying the view they should be. No fuckin’ order in the universe.”

“Marcus Aurelius would say you’re here because you’re supposed to be.”

“Then let’s go with Mr. Aurelius.” He laughed. “Benny Joe tell you I was born on Corse, and I’m a hard case?”

“Pisses him off you don’t say Corsica.”

“I can go either way on that, but I like jerking his chain. Where do you want to start?”

“I’ve visited a couple of times, and it didn’t seem like a hotbed of Jewish culture.”

“That’s an understatement. A hundred families and one
synagogue on the whole fuckin’ island, and not one gravestone that doesn’t have a swastika painted on it. There’ve been Jews there since the beginning of recorded history, and through most of it, somebody’s been trying to run us out. My, but we are a stubborn people.”

“Lot of ignorance in the world.”

“Fuckin-A. That’s State Department talk for, ‘If I didn’t get weekends off, I’d cash out.’”

A phone rang in the house, and Jackie held up his hand so he could listen to the message machine. It was somebody named Doris inviting him and Nancy for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at seven.

“Nance, you want to go over there and get groped by that dame’s husband again?”

“Sure, why not. Long as I come home with you. You love those little shrimp things they serve,” she called back cheerily.

Jackie looked back at me. “Is this fuckin’ great or what?”

I was happy for the guy.

“Okay,” he said, “let me give you in a few sentences what it takes diplomats and presidents years to figure out. On Corsica, whether it’s separatists, terrorists, nationalists, revolutionaries…whatever…sooner or later everything intersects with the Mafia. Not the fat guys at the big tables on Mott Street in Manhattan. They’re dangerous, but they’re one-at-a-time killers. Corsica’s run by the originals, the Sicilians. Guys who a lot of times can’t get on the same page long enough to steal because they’re too busy whacking cops, mayors, prosecutors and each other. As many as possible, as often as possible. Those of us who made our living keeping track of them used to say that ‘Go along, get along’ can’t even be translated into Sicilian.”

“Who runs the show?”

Jackie poured himself another glass of lemonade.

“Guy by the name of Gaetano Bruzzi. They call him
Il Iena Bianco
.”

“‘The White Hyena’?”

He nodded. “Huge fucking guy. Long mane of curly white hair. Not old man’s hair. Just white. And a mouthful of oversized teeth that push back his lips in a perpetual grin. Like those Chupacabra pictures that scare the shit out of Mexicans. If you hung Bruzzi’s mug shot at the border you’d probably end illegal immigration.”

I thought back to Marta Videz. A very tall, very
anchuro
man. Long white hair.
Much teeth
.

Jackie continued, “And just like Chupie, when he bites, it’s for keeps—in more ways than one. A few years ago, one of his crew smuggled in a pair of hyenas for his birthday—real ones. Bruzzi thought it was the best gift he’d ever gotten. Just the idea of it gave people the shits.”