Red Rag Blues (24 page)

Too much sand in the cement, perhaps. Or maybe not enough patience to let it harden.

Sloppy.

The bullet that clipped Sammy's femoral lay in the sodden carpet of the penthouse until the police found it. They already knew he hadn't been shot when he was in the Studebaker: no slug, no hole in the seat, and the angle of entry of the leg wound was wrong. Plus he'd been in the penthouse. They found the same carpet fibers plastered all over the bloody seat of his pants. Also, blood splashes in the elevator and the lobby matched Sammy's type. He was a Fantoni, so the NYPD was happy to let the FBI have the case as part of its investigation of organized crime. But shooting a guy in the leg, torching somebody else's apartment, driving the guy up Broadway in the rain until he's dead and the vehicle quit because nobody ever took the trouble to change the oil filter: that wasn't organized crime. That was disheveled crime.

The coroner kept Sammy while the FBI went poking around, listening for leaks from the other New York families and hearing nothing but disbelief and disdain at the decline of professional standards, no wonder you couldn't find a good plumber nowadays. So the coroner released the body. Jerome Fantoni organized the funeral. It took place in Jersey, at the church of St. Nicholas of Tolentino, a spacious venue, it needed to be, three hundred and twenty mourners. An orchestra of fifteen and a choir of thirty performed a Monteverdi Requiem, after which everyone retired to the residence of Jerome Fantoni to restore their fluid balance.

This was announced, briefly, in
The New York Times.
The notice added that a private interment would take place next day at Yonkers cemetery. Prendergast and Fisk attended.

They stood under a majestic chestnut, out of the sun, and watched a small group of people walk down a winding driveway through parkland that would cost a hundred dollars an inch in Manhattan. The hearse followed, crunching the gravel as softly as a burglar. The mausoleum had been built in the Yonkers house-style: a square room and a gable roof, all made of simple white stone. FANTONI was carved above the entrance in foot-high capitals. In this leafy setting, the place looked more like a pretentious Wendy house than a tomb. “Even when they die, the rich live better,” Prendergast said. “It's a lousy shame.”

A man who was either the funeral director or the maitre d' at the Waldorf-Astoria walked over to them and said this was a private occasion and would they please move on.

“We're family,” Prendergast said. “I'm Uncle Sam, and so is he.”

The man liked that. His left eyebrow climbed one millimeter. In the circumstances it was as good as a standing ovation. He turned and went back.

Folding chairs had been arranged in a half-circle. The party sat and listened to a violinist and a cellist play Bach. Even the birds shut up, out of respect. Then the casket got carried inside. Finally there was more Bach, much livelier. The chairs were packed away. Limos drifted down the drive, collected the party, drifted away. Now only Jerome Fantoni was left. He lit a pipe and ambled across the grass to the giant chestnut.

“The purists will never forgive me for tampering with a sonata for unaccompanied violin,” he said, “but the cello adds such gravitas. The arrangement is my own.”

“I wouldn't change a note,” Prendergast said. “I'm a tenor sax man myself, and Fisk here favors the harmonica.”

“Yes? Very brave of him. Have you any news?”

“Well, a pattern is emerging, sir,” Fisk said. “Sightings at Hoboken docks, then at East 84th Street, West 10th Street, your own residence in New Jersey, plus the arson attack on the penthouse on Central Park West. We have your nephew at all those places when Luis Cabrillo was there too.”

“And, of course, we have him ultimately in Cabrillo's Studebaker,” Prendergast added.

“Cabrillo had been my dinner guest. Sammy's idea. There was a girl, too, I fancy Sammy was more interested in her. Nothing memorable happened. I have a lot of dinner guests.”

“This one disappeared,” Fisk said. “The girl also. Could be they had a lot to disappear from. Cabrillo has Known Communist Associates. They're both blacklisted.”

“So he's a Red. That's no reason to kill my nephew. What is Cabrillo's motive, for God's sake?”

“Sammy wanted his girl. We found a .38 in Sammy's coat pocket. Maybe Cabrillo fired first.” There was a silence while they all thought about that.

“We found another .38 in the Studebaker,” Prendergast said. “Under the seat. With written directions about how to find Vinnie Biaggi.”

“Cabrillo.” Fantoni tapped out his pipe on his heel. “It's all Cabrillo, isn't it?” he said. They walked toward the drive. A squirrel saw its chance and ran to the shreds of tobacco lying in
the grass, sniffed, hesitated, backed off. It might be a trap. You got all sorts of freaks and weirdos in this cemetery.

“Three dead, and two on the run,” Fisk said. “A pattern is definitely emerging, sir.”

“You know where to find us if they turn up for dinner,” Prendergast said. They left him staring at the mausoleum as if someone had told him it had a spelling mistake but he was damned if he could see it.

They turned a bend in the drive, walking slowly because of the heat.

“I feel uncomfortable about using the Mob to find Cabrillo,” Fisk said.

“I don't,” Prendergast said. “Their budget's bigger than ours.”

He was right about that. Fantoni had one potential clue as to Cabrillo's whereabouts: the black Buick Cabrillo had driven away in. Had vanished in. Fantoni's organization had associates and affiliates all up and down the East Coast. Quite quickly they knew the license-plate number. It was a start.

Time passed. This was out of the control of the CIA, the FBI, the NYPD, or even the Mafia.

Jerome Fantoni was surprised how much he missed Sammy. In his industry, people came and went; and Sammy hadn't been the sharpest knife in the box, but he
had
been loyal and attentive, and in his uncle's scale of values that rated high. There was too much dishonesty in the industry. You hijacked a truckload of booze and then people stole. They got paid for hijacking yet still they stole, a case of Scotch here and there, it all added up. Sammy never stole. He did as he was told and whacked the guys who stole. Now Jerome had lost that portion of loyalty and honesty, and he didn't know why, and this upset him. Jerome wanted balance, equity, closure. He wanted Cabrillo. He had his people out looking for him.

Kim Philby missed Cabrillo in a very different way. He knew—because the Consulate knew what the FBI knew—that Luis had probably gone to San Francisco, presumably after being scared out of Central Park West. Maybe the fright would persuade him to
stop making a nuisance of himself; but Philby remembered the Cabrillo of the Double-Cross days: tireless, restless, never satisfied. “I think he'll be back,” Philby told Harding. “I'll hang about for a while.”

Frank Magee was a cop in Washington, hardworking, honest, reliable. In fifteen years working the toughest part of town, the harbor area, Magee racked up commendations and scars equally. Then, in six months, a burglar with a knife slashed his face and a drunk with a baseball bat broke his arm. The bone healed but most days the arm ached. The Department transferred him to Georgetown, where the crime of choice was adultery. Burglary was left to the possums. Nobody's peach trees were safe. It was a scandal.

Magee was walking down Potomac Street when he saw the Buick parked beside the fire plug, and he said, “You bastard.” He'd already written five tickets for this car, same offense, same place. He could see the goddamn tickets now, poked in the glove compartment. Son of a bitch. A fire crew would waste valuable seconds, dragging a hose around this heap. He checked the license plates again. Not even diplomatic! Registered in New goddamn Jersey! He wrote another ticket, slapped it behind the wipers, went and found a phone and told his sergeant.

It was a quiet day. The sergeant didn't like Buicks. His first wife had wanted a Buick, bitched about their Chevy, wasn't going to be happy until they got a fat stinkin' Buick, so in the end he took out a lousy bank loan and bought a Buick and guess what? She still wasn't happy. The sergeant told the captain that Magee was papering a Buick with tickets in Georgetown.

The captain didn't like Georgetown. Everyone there made three times the money he'd ever make and their neurotic wives phoned the police department if the garbage men dropped half an eggshell in the driveway. He talked to an assistant DA and they agreed that this was blatant and persistent contempt of law, aggravated by the fact that the car belonged to a shithead who lived in New Jersey. The assistant DA had gone through Marine Corps boot camp in New Jersey. He drew up a warrant for the
arrest of the owner of the Buick and began the process of extradition for trial in DC. It probably wouldn't work, but at least it would pay back New Jersey for shaving his head.

*

Jerome Fantoni had friends in DC, and these friends had friends in the DA's office. Where was the harm in that? It was only a goddam parking offense. Before the warrant and the extradition order had been completed, Jerome knew the details.

He could have contracted the job to a local affiliate. But this thing was about Sammy. This was family. He chose one of Sammy's cousins, Chick Scatola. Scatola listened when you spoke, did what you said, and dressed like he worked for IBM, so nobody should look twice at him in Georgetown. “Luis Cabrillo,” Jerome said. “Your age, height, build. Probably lives on or near Potomac Street. Took my black Buick. Here's the license number, spare keys. Find the car, you'll find Cabrillo. He knocked off Sammy and he's a Communist sympathizer. Erase him. Lose the man, lose the car, call me when.”

“Cabrillo was never there, sir,” Chick said. “Nobody will miss him, except the Reds, and who gives a shit about them?”

*

Chick Scatola had the face of IBM but it concealed the soul of MGM. He was a passionate man. He cried at hockey games. He took sex very, very seriously, and as a result he got very little of it, but his prospects had changed since Vinnie Biaggi was made into veal. For years Chick Scatola had lusted after Stevie; but he was too decent, too stupid, too honorable, too scared to make his move: Mount Rushmore on the outside, Mount Aetna in the inside. Now she was free and when he offered his deepest sympathies she French-kissed him even deeper and said she was still a virgin after three marriages, what was wrong with men, caught their whanger in their zipper, or what? From then on, their friendship blossomed. He was into her life. Now all he had to do was get into her pants.

He telephoned her at the hairdressing salon, asked did she feel like a trip to Washington, couple of days, see the sights, eat a bucket of clams maybe. “Why the hell not?” she said. He picked her up in his Chrysler half an hour later. When they hit the Jersey
Turnpike the sun was so bright she put on her Ray-Bans. He thought she looked like Audrey Hepburn. And she could share the driving. It was 220 miles to DC. He wanted to arrive fresh. Scatola was not all pure lust. Inside MGM there lurked a piece of IBM.

Luis spent a lot of time in the Library of Congress. Intelligence reports must be convincing, especially when they were faked. He researched the Red threat to America. There was much to read.

He took a break, went outside to stretch his legs. A young woman of elfin beauty approached him. “I saw you in the library,” she said. Big gray eyes and a tiny, whispery voice. “You were reading that wonderful book by Senator McCarthy.”

“Yes.”

“That man is this nation's moral compass.”

“I'll remember to tell him that.”

“You actually know him? What a privilege! He fights fire with fire, and let the chips fall where they may. He smoked out the Communists in our midst. It had to be done.”

“You're nobody's fool, are you?”

“Well, somebody betrayed America.” Her eyes were huge with patriotism, her voice fine as gauze. “Somebody stole our atom bomb secrets and gave them to the goddam Russians, and that was after we went over there and beat that bastard Hitler, and then this sonofabitch Stalin takes all eastern Europe from us, and now we had to save Korea from the Chinese, and today no country, not even America, is safe from the evil tentacles sent to suck our blood by the Communist fucking juggernaut.” There was a little foam at the right-hand corner of her mouth.

When Luis got home, he repeated the conversation to Julie. He mentioned the foam. “She felt very strongly,” he said.

“Well, I was blacklisted,” Julie said. “I feel fucking strongly too.”

“I forgot to tell her that.”

“No, you didn't. You chickened out.”

“My mind was on higher things. Money,” he said, before she could ask.

“Bullshit.”

“The two are often confused.”

The rain drifted north and left Washington to stew in the kind of humidity that grows fungi in clothes closets and sweaty headlines in newspapers.

A bunch of reporters were hanging about in the shade of the Capitol building, hoping that some news would fall out of the sky like birdshit, when they saw Senator McCarthy heading for the Senate Office Building and they closed in on him. Later they pooled their shorthand notes and agreed on a common record of question and answer.

Q: How you feeling, Joe?

A: Fine. You ought to ask how America feels about President Eisenhower's promise to clean out all the security risks he inherited from the treasonous Truman administration.

Q: The White House say they're working on it. What's the rush?

A: I'll tell you what's the rush: regaining national honor, that's the rush. Our government is still riddled with Communists, fellow-travelers, Truman-type Democrats guilty of blood-stained blunders and when the Soviet agents scream so loudly about McCarthyism, they betray themselves as obviously as they've betrayed their country. You got all that?