House Odds (32 page)

“Does it look like I’m serious!” Mahoney yelled. And then seeing the expression on DeMarco’s face he added, “And one thing I don’t need right now is you turning into a fuckin’ Boy Scout on me.”

The last thing DeMarco was was a Boy Scout. And the fact that Mahoney’s plan was illegal and included the subversion of two, maybe three, government agencies wasn’t what shocked him.

What shocked him was the cold-blooded brutality of Mahoney’s plan.

Ted Allen should never have cornered the bear.

46

Mahoney returned to the Capitol, changed back into a suit and tie, and lit a cigar. No one was going to tell him that he couldn’t smoke in his own office.

So. What could he give these guys to get them to do what he wanted? He called Perry Wallace to his office; Perry’s big brain would produce the answer.

Perry came in, looking like he’d slept in the suit he was wearing—and maybe he had. It wasn’t unusual for Perry to pull an all-nighter to bend politicians to Mahoney’s will.

They concluded that Randy Sawyer would be easy because there was an undersecretary of Treasury position opening up in a couple of months. Perry had read that the guy currently in the job was going back to investment banking; he figured two years of public service had cost him about twenty million—and that was enough.

“Sawyer wants to be considered a big financial guru and he’s tired of the SEC,” Perry said. “He wants to appear on CNN and tell folks how if the administration would just listen to him, things would be different. If he could get his ticket at Treasury punched, and if somebody over at one of the networks would even
hint
that they might call him the next time they need a so-called expert, Sawyer would drool all over himself.”

“Do we have a TV guy that’ll whisper in his ear?”

“We got a TV gal. You remember how we leaked the story on the Fed chairman to Marsha Turner last year?”

“Yeah.”

“So Marsha owes us. And she’s bright enough to make it sound like she’s promising Randy something without really promising him anything.”

“How do we get Treasury to give Randy the job?”

“That’s easy. HR 2019.”

HR 2019 was a bill currently passing through the House that expanded the powers of the secretary of the Treasury in a very subtle way. Mahoney had promised to vote against the bill and make every other Democrat vote his way.

“Aw, shit,” Mahoney said. “Do I gotta give him that one?”

Perry shrugged. “It’s your daughter.”

“All right. And how do we tell Sawyer what we want him to do?”

“We just tell him,” Perry said. “We don’t have to be subtle with Randy. And I’ll talk to him. You want some distance between yourself and him.”

“Okay, now what about the guy at Justice? He’s going to be a lot harder to move than Randy. Plus, I don’t trust the fucker.”

“Harvard,” Perry said.

“Harvard?”

“He wants to teach. He wants to pontificate to a bunch of kids and write the book he’s been talking about writing for the last twenty years.”

Harvard was easy, Mahoney was thinking. They owed him so damn much that he could get the president of Harvard to kiss the guy’s ass in Harvard Square if that’s what he wanted.

“But it may take more than Harvard to get him to relocate to Boston,” Perry said. “I think you need to have something in your back pocket if it looks like Harvard won’t be enough.”

“Like what?”

“I was thinking a position on the board of Paul Anderson’s company. He pays board members a hundred and twenty-five grand a year to agree with him.”

Yeah, Anderson would do it, Mahoney thought. He didn’t owe Mahoney as much as Harvard did, but he owed him enough. The helicopter pad at Anderson’s headquarters had been paid for with federal funds—thanks to John Mahoney.

“I’ll talk to Anderson and Harvard,” Perry said, “but you’ll have to talk to the guy at Justice. And you’re going to have to be really, uh,
subtle
with him. I mean, he’ll figure it out but you can’t just go straight at him and tell him it’s tit for tat, Molly for Harvard.”

“I can handle him,” Mahoney said.

Perry raised an eyebrow—meaning:
Are your sure?
Subtlety wasn’t one of Mahoney’s strong points.

“I can handle him,” Mahoney said again. “But are you sure the White House isn’t going to be a problem?”

Perry shrugged. “An undersecretary position at Treasury is pretty low on the radar. And they can’t stop the guy at Justice from leaving. But I don’t know. Now, if you’d go to Pakistan like the president wants . . .”

“Goddamnit,” Mahoney said. “Do I have to do that?”

“It would help,” Perry said.

The secretary of state—a gal who could piss off Santa Claus—had just pissed off the Pakistanis again. The president knew that Mahoney had a good relationship with the prime minister of Pakistan—he had known the guy for thirty years—and he wanted Mahoney to fly over there and smooth things out.

When the president asked him to do this, they’d just arrested Molly and he’d told the president it wasn’t a good time for him to leave town. The other thing was, there was always a good chance of somebody killing you when you went to places like Pakistan. So now what he’d have to do was agree to go there, and would probably have to leave tonight. But if he was gone for a couple of days, that was all right. It’d give DeMarco a chance to go talk to the gangster.

“Okay,” Mahoney said. “But Pakistan. Goddamnit.”

Mahoney picked up the phone. “Mavis, see if Jim Steele over at Justice can meet me for a drink around five, and then get me an appointment with Horrigan. I need to see him this afternoon.”

Fuckin’ Tommy Horrigan. He was the president’s chief of staff and a political wolverine and as smart as anybody Mahoney knew. As soon as Mahoney told him he was willing to do the president a favor and go to Pakistan, Horrigan would know that something was going on.

But what else could he do? Surviving in this town was hard. It became really hard when your daughter was a crook.

47

Driving toward Philadelphia, DeMarco tried to sort out how he felt about last night.

Dinner with Tina and her daughters had been—for lack of a better word—an ordeal. The girls were eighteen-year-old carbon copies of each other—and their mother—and they had decided it was their job to determine if DeMarco was suitable boyfriend material. They started off, like all good interrogators do, with a few soft questions to put him at ease, then started to bore in. They probed, and not very subtly, about whether or not he was steadily employed and likely to remain so. He could see them checking off little boxes on a mental questionnaire when he told them he had his own home and government-subsidized health insurance. Since when did eighteen-year-old kids give a damn about health insurance?

Then there was his past as it related to women. One of the twins—he still wasn’t sure which one was Kathy and which one was Karen—said, “I understand you’ve been married before.” He figured this bit of intelligence had been passed on to Tina from Alice and then Tina passed it to the inquisitors.

“Yeah, once,” he said—and didn’t say more—which, of course, was not tolerated. By the time the smart little brats left for their concert he felt as if he’d been sitting on the witness stand for two hours.

Sex after dinner with their mother was almost compensation for the grilling—but now he was beginning to have his doubts. He liked Tina, but he wasn’t really thinking beyond the next date. He certainly wasn’t thinking, at least not yet, in terms of a long-term relationship—but he could tell she and her daughters were. And he could see his future—being triple-teamed by Tina and the bookends, being molded into whatever shape they wanted to mold him into—and it was a future too frightening to contemplate.

Maybe.

* * *

As he approached Al Castiglia’s front door, DeMarco was amazed by all the statues on the lawn. He was particularly surprised to see the little black lawn-jockey by the mailbox, surprised that some member of the African-American community hadn’t knocked its head off. But then, considering who Al Castiglia was, maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

He found Castiglia playing three-cushion billiards in the basement of his home. Castiglia was a big guy, six-four, gray-haired, potbellied, massive upper arms. With him was a dark-complexioned man built like a light-heavyweight. The man was wearing sunglasses, which was odd as Castiglia’s billiards room was dimly lit, only a single lamp over the billiard table. The guy with the shades was definitely muscle—muscle that could apparently see in the dark.

Castiglia didn’t look at DeMarco immediately. He was hunched over his cue stick, studying his next shot. “You play?” he asked.

DeMarco shook his head. “No, never played billiards. Just pool.”

“Yeah, nobody plays billiards anymore. Everybody plays eight ball. Shit, anybody can play eight ball. This takes real skill.”

On the billiard table were two white balls, one with a yellow spot on it, and a single red ball. Castiglia took his shot, the tip of the cue stick making solid contact with the spotted white ball. The spotted ball hit a rail, then another rail, then a third rail before it hit the other white ball, and then just
kissed
the red ball. DeMarco didn’t know if that was a good shot or not, but Castiglia seemed to think so. “Now you show me some Minnesota Fats wannabe that can do that,” he said. Turning to the guy in the sunglasses, he said, “Right, Delray?”

Delray didn’t say anything. Delray was scary.

Castiglia put the cue stick down on the table and looked at DeMarco for the first time. “I can’t believe how much you look like your dad,” he said. “I knew him when he worked for Taliaferro. Did you know that?”

“No,” DeMarco said.

“Well, I did. And you look just like him. It’s kinda spooky.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that.

“Anyway, so what do you want?” Castiglia said. “I checked you out after you called, but all I learned was that you’re some kinda lawyer who works for Congress. So if you’re here to talk to me about some legal thing, one of those fuckin’ hearings you clowns in D.C. are always holding, you can haul your ass on outta here. Even if I did know your dad, I don’t talk about legal shit without my lawyer.”

“This has nothing to do with Congress,” DeMarco said. “I’m here to talk to you about a guy who works for you. I thought you might want to hear what he’s been up to.”

“Who’s that?” Castiglia said.

“Ted Allen.”

“Allen doesn’t work for me. I heard he works for some outfit called Indigo Gaming. Ain’t that right, Delray?”

Again Delray didn’t respond. DeMarco was starting to wonder if he was mute.

“Fine,” DeMarco said, “Ted works for Indigo Gaming and you have nothing to do with that company. But let me tell you what he’s been doing anyway.”

Castiglia made a suit-yourself face.

“Do you know who Congressman John Mahoney is?” DeMarco said.

“You mean that fat, white-haired guy from Boston?”

“Yeah, that guy. He’s one of the most powerful politicians in the country.”

“So what?” Castiglia said. “What’s he got to do with me?”

“Well, Ted Allen, this guy who doesn’t work for you, the first thing he did was notice that Mahoney’s daughter was spending a lot of time in his casino, losing her money playing craps. So, nice man that he is, Ted extended her a hundred thousand dollar line of credit which she also lost.”

Castiglia shrugged. “If people are gonna gamble, they oughta know their limit. So is that why you’re here? You want Ted to tear up her marker because her old man’s a big shot in Congress?”

“No, the marker’s already been torn up.”

“What!” Castiglia said, unable to stop himself.

DeMarco could tell that the idea of absolving a gambler’s debt didn’t appeal to Al Castiglia; more important, it was apparent that Castiglia had no idea what Ted had done.

“But we’ll get to the marker later. You see, after Mahoney’s daughter couldn’t pay what she owed, she came to Ted with a proposition.”

Then DeMarco proceeded to tell Castiglia how Ted Allen had advanced Molly half a million bucks on an insider-trading scheme, that Molly had been arrested, and the money was now frozen by the federal government. He also explained how Molly’s marker had been bought by Congressman Robert Fairchild, and that now Fairchild was essentially blackmailing Mahoney.

As DeMarco talked, Castiglia struggled to keep his face in a neutral position. He was struggling so hard it looked like a big blue vein in his forehead was about to rupture. DeMarco could tell that Al Castiglia wasn’t used to restraining himself in any way.

“Son of a . . . ,” Castiglia said. “And you say some lobbyist knows about all this, too? A fuckin’ lobbyist!”

“Yeah. I don’t know about you, Mr. Castiglia, but I think Ted fucked up pretty good. You’re old school. You would never have authorized something like this, and now, whether you like it or not, the SEC and the Department of Justice are involved and they just might end up tracing this whole thing back to your boy. And the money that’s been frozen by the government? Well, you’re not going to get that back, not the way things stand right now.”