Spearfield's Daughter (51 page)

“You like English food? Tony Rossano recommended this place to me.” He had a soft, rough voice. “I don't like the pasta. All the time, everyone think Italians eat nothing but the pasta. The best food is the English roast and beef and the Yukshire pudding. Is better for you than all that pasta. Now what you want? Don't forget we're in Kansas City, not here.” His smile had a certain charm to it if one didn't look at his eyes. “You ask the questions, I give you the answers. Maybe.”

Hal attacked the roast beef and left the questions to Cleo. “You weren't called to the hearings in Kansas City, Mr. Apollo, nor in Chicago, though you've had business dealings there for some years.”

“Not in Chicago.” Apollo glanced at Sirio, but the legal adviser didn't seem to think that was a statement that might incriminate him. “I ain't had any business there, eight, ten years. In K.C. I'm in legitimate business, dry cleaning, parking lots, things like that. Why would the committee wanna call me, a legitimate businessman? They don't call David Rockefeller from the Chase Manhattan, right?”

Cleo cut into the Yorkshire pudding, which defied her knife as if it were Malayan rubber. “Mr. Rockefeller isn't an ex-boy friend of Miss Billie Locke.”

“You done your homework.” Apollo was still amiable. “She was some dame, y'know that? She coulda been real class, she hadn't got mixed up with some of them bums she knows.”

Cleo gave up on the Yorkshire pudding. “Mr. Apollo, why are you unpopular with the Syndicate?”

“
Unpopular? You don't like your Yukshire pudding? Gimme.” He speared the pudding and transferred it to his own plate. “They don't like me because I wanna be my own boss in my own terr'tory.”

“In the dry cleaning and parking lot territory?”

Apollo smiled again, unoffended. “At's right. You see, Miss Spearfield, I wanna be one of the Good People—”

“The Mafia,” said Hal as Cleo looked blank.

“What's the Mafia, Mr. Rainer? We call ourselves the Good People, sometimes the old men call us the Honoured Society. I wanna be one of ‘em, but I don't wanna be told what I can do in my own terr'tory.”

As the dinner progressed it began to dawn on Cleo that Apollo had granted this interview out of vanity. The man was laying himself open to a declaration of war by the Syndicate if he allowed himself to be quoted on what he had said so far; the Syndicate or the Mafia, or the Honoured Society or the Good People did not like men who talked to outsiders. Apollo wanted his name in the papers along with all those Big Names that had featured at the hearings. He was not the first man whose vanity had made him stupid.

“You wouldn't volunteer to give evidence before the committee?”

Apollo looked at Sirio, then at his plate. Suddenly he pushed the plate away from him, gulped down his wine as if he had all at once become very thirsty. “Depends. Some of these guys, the ones everybody sees in the papers and on TV . . . A man, he's got a right to earn a living in his own terr'tory, right?”

Hal said, “You mean the Syndicate is trying to muscle in on Kansas City?”

“You know K.C., Mr. Rainer? You know what a nice quiet place it could be, if people mind their own business? You want dessert, some nice bread-and-butter pudding?”

Shades of Jack, thought Cleo. What would he say if he saw whom I'm was eating good sensible food with?

“Those guys, no names but you know who I mean, they stay outa K.C., I got a nice business terr'tory. But they're greedy . . .” He sounded sorry for himself. He was in the right place, the Tower of London: no one in the original Tower had ever been ecstatic.

The restaurant had begun to empty now; it was the hour between the early diners and the theatre
crowd
who would come in for a late supper. The Beefeater came in the front door and stood there; a man in a dark topcoat and hat stood behind him. The man looked over the Beefeater's shoulder, as if deciding whether he liked the look of the restaurant, then said something to someone behind him. Two other men, also in topcoats, hats pulled low on their foreheads, suddenly stepped out of the alcove beside the front door. They came down towards the rear of the restaurant, not running but walking swiftly, taking the submachine-guns from under their coats as they did so. The few diners still in the restaurant looked up at them, but didn't take in what was about to happen.

Apollo and Sirio, facing the front door, suddenly stood up. Cleo looked back over her shoulder and saw the guns; she hurled herself sideways, knocking Hal off his chair. The two of them sprawled on the floor and the brief hail of bullets went over them and into the chests of Frank Apollo and Paul Sirio. Both men teetered back, then Sirio crumpled to the floor. Apollo remained on his feet for a moment, one hand raised as if in protest to the two gunmen; then he fell face forward into the bread-and-butter custard that had just been brought by the waiter. Cleo, lying on the floor beneath the table, saw one of the gunmen look at her and Hal, then point his gun at her. She waited to die, mind and body paralysed. Then the other man shook his head and both turned and went back up to the front door, moving their guns back and forth across the restaurant, like cleaners waving brooms and telling the tardy diners it was time to go home. They joined the man at the front door and went out without a backward glance. The Beefeater, the guardian of the Tower, fainted in a red, ruffled heap like a rooster overcome at having just missed the axe.

Hal Rainer got up from the floor, helped Cleo to her feet. “Thanks. I'd have got some of that in the back of the head if you hadn't—” Then he looked at Apollo lying face down in the bloodstained bread- and-butter custard. “Well, we got a story. Not the one we came looking for—”

“Better,” said Cleo, alive and no longer afraid of dying.

Then she looked at Frank Apollo and wanted to be sick. She turned away and, apart from her heaving stomach, felt nothing. Pity was something you didn't waste in certain terr'tories.

V

The killing of Apollo and his henchman, the legal adviser whose only advice, it turned out, was the gun in the armpit holster that he did not get out in time, was a Page One story in every newspaper in
town.
Under Cleo's and Hal's joint by-line in the
Courier
it ran over to a further two full columns on Page Two. The photographer who had followed them up from the
Courier
and had been fretting to his driver about wasted time, had got the only pictures of the bodies that appeared in any New York paper. Hal had rung the police and ambulance before any of the restaurant staff or guests had got over their shock; then he had stood by the phone to see that no smart waiter, anxious to earn an extra buck or two, rang any rival newspaper. By the time other photographers did arrive on the scene the bodies were already covered with tablecloths and on stretchers waiting to be wheeled out to the ambulance. Jake Lintas, conservative as always, had demurred about running the graphic pictures, but Carl Fishburg and Bill Puskas convinced him they were too good to throw out.

The story, as Cleo and Hal told it, meant the recall before the Senate committee of all the leading figures of the past week. But the mobsters denied any knowledge of Frank Apollo; to hear them tell it, they lived in a Garden of Eden where all they knew was innocence. In the end the police decided the killers were out-of-towners, probably sent in from Chicago. The one thing that worried Cleo was that Tony Rossano had disappeared and she began to wonder if it was he who had set up the killing of Apollo and Sirio, hoping that she and Hal might be killed in the crossfire.

“The thought occurred to me, too,” said Hal.

“Does it make you sweat?”

“Naturally.” Then he put his hand on her arm, one of the few times he ever had; he kept gestures of affection to a minimum. “Don't worry, girl. He won't come back.”

Claudine did not like the way the story had been featured, but she made no complaint to Jake Lintas. She did, however, bring it up at the next board meeting. “It sold a few extra copies for a week or so, but sales have dropped back again.”

“Maybe we should run more stories like it,” said Stephen Jensen.

“One can't keep manufacturing sensations day after day.”

“Mr. Lintas doesn't even seem capable of manufacturing
news.
If I may suggest it, Claudine, I think you should spend more time as publisher and less as chairman of the board.”

Lately, she had noticed, Stephen had begun to show a degree of opposition to her. Several years ago she had had an affair with him that had lasted a year, one that they had discreetly kept from their
respective
children and their friends. She had terminated it when she had discovered that he was having another affair with a much younger woman at the same time. She had complimented him on his stamina, since her own appetite had not been diminished by her age, and told him to concentrate it on the other woman. Since then she had had no lover, though she still felt the urge for one occasionally and remembered Stephen's talents with some satisfaction. But she had never loved him, nor he her. Nonetheless, she had never expected him to start opposing her, at least in business, the way he had been for several months.

“I am satisfied with the way Mr. Lintas is running things. There is something else that causes me more concern. I am told that someone has been buying up stock in the paper. Something like twenty per cent has already changed hands. Who is buying and, more importantly, for the moment anyway, who is selling?”

There were seven other board members besides Claudine and Jensen, all men, all around Claudine's age. Glances passed round the table like mice looking for a way out of a maze. Then one man said, “I was going to bring it up later in the meeting. I've sold my stock. I have my letter here and my resignation from the board.”

“Which I'll accept unread, Charles,” said Claudine, as if through a mouthful of dry ice. “Whom have you sold to?”

“To be honest, I'm not sure. I think it's just a front company. I feel bad about this—”

“As you should,” said Claudine.

“—but part of the deal was that I told no one until the stock had changed hands. The price was too good to ignore, Claudine.”

“I shan't ask you what you got, that would only bring me down to your mercenary level. Why didn't you come to me and see if I would buy the stock if you were so eager to get out?”

“Would you have paid me five dollars above the current market price?” The man, fat and florid, seemed to be growing bigger and redder with Claudine's curtness. He knew he had done an unethical thing, but business was business and any offer that got him out of the newspaper business had its own absolution.

“No,” said Claudine; then looked around the table. “Has anyone else sold his stock?”

A tall bald-headed man said, “As you know, Claudine, I have no stock of my own. I am here representing the Hilliard family. We received an offer and I recommended they accept it. The price was the
same
as Charles got.”

“I'll accept your resignation too, David. Anyone else?”

Two other men, one a lawyer, the other a banker, each of them representing outside stockholders, said, yes, they had sold out. She was far from being as composed as she looked; she was deeply shocked. She knew that certain members of the board had been very dissatisfied with the paper's performance over the past few years; she was as aware as they that newspapers were dying all over the United States. If the stockholders wanted to sell out, she had expected they would warn her. Instead, they had presented her with a
fait accompli.

She looked at Stephen Jensen, her only real friend on the board. He shook his head at her unspoken query. “They made me an offer, Claudine, but I declined it. I wasn't being entirely altruistic or honourable. I just figured that anyone who wanted to pay almost fifteen per cent above the market price for a stock that hasn't moved in three years must be either crazy or he knows something I don't know. I don't think you should be so critical of Charles and the others. They've held their stock in the
Courier
for God knows how many years and I think they've been very patient and long suffering.”

“I hope their suffering is relieved now,” said Claudine, sounding like Florence Nightingale burning herself on her lamp. “Exactly how much stock has gone to this mysterious buyer?”

“Twenty-two per cent. Enough to give them at least two seats on the board, if they ask for them.”

“Well, we'll wait and let them make the approach.” She wasn't going down the road to meet the tumbrils.

“I wonder if it's laundered money from the Mafia?” Jensen said. “Or is it just coincidence that the bids started right after the
Courier
featured that story on the Apollo killing?”

The thought troubled Claudine, but she still looked calm. “I'd have no gangster sitting on this board.”

“You wouldn't have a gangster,” said Jensen. “He would probably be a perfectly respectable lawyer. Respectable on the surface, anyway.”

Two nights later Claudine had Alain and Cleo to dinner in the penthouse and told them of the sales of stock. “Stephen Jensen has raised the possibility of its being Mafia money that has bought into the
paper.
You may regret having pursued that Apollo story, Cleo.”

“I think that's unfair, Mother,” said Alain.

“Do you think so?” Claudine looked at Cleo.

This was the first time Cleo had been invited up to the penthouse. It was almost as if Claudine had kept her at arm's length, out of her own private territory; Souillac might be the palace, but palaces have always been accessible. Cleo had been apprehensive about coming here tonight, wondering if, in her autocratic way, Claudine was going to tell her that she could now marry into the family.