Silence. A U-turn on the grand-route and the driver pressed the accelerator to the floor. “I’m here,” whispered the husband, lifting his right arm and pulling his wife to him. “I don’t know for how long, but I’m here.”
“Hurry, my darling.”
“I will. I just want to hold you in my arms.”
“And I want to call the children.”
“Now I know I’m here.”
28
“You’ll tell us everything we want to know voluntarily or we’ll send you up into a chemical orbit your hacks never dreamed of with Dr. Panov,” said Peter Holland, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, his quiet monotone as hard and as smooth as polished granite. “Furthermore, I should elaborate on, the extremes to which I’m perfectly willing to go because I’m from the old school, paisan. I don’t give a shit for rules that favor garbage. You play cipher with me, I’ll deep-six you still breathing a hundred miles off Hatteras in a torpedo casing. Am I clear?”
The capo subordinato, thick plaster casts around his left arm and right leg, lay on the bed in Langley’s deserted infirmary room, deserted since the DCI ordered the medical staff to get out of hearing range for their own good. The mafioso’s naturally puffed face was additionally enlarged by swellings around both eyes as well as his generous lips, the result of his head having smashed into the dashboard when Mo Panov sent the car into a Maryland oak. He looked up at Holland, his heavy-lidded gaze traveling over to Alexander Conklin seated in a chair, the ever-present cane gripped in anxious hands.
“You got no right, Mr. Big Shot,” said the capo gruffly. “ ’Cause I got rights, you know what I mean?”
“So did the doctor, and you violated them—Jesus, did you violate them!”
“I don’t gotta talk without my lawyer.”
“Where the hell was Panov’s lawyer?” shouted Alex, thumping his cane on the floor.
“That’s not the way the system works,” protested the patient, attempting to raise his eyebrows in indignation. “Besides, I was good to the doc. He took advantage of my goodness, s’help me God!”
“You’re a cartoon,” said Holland. “You’re a hot sketch but you’re not remotely amusing. There are no lawyers here, linguine, just the three of us, and a torpedo casing is very much in your future.”
“Whaddaya want from me?” cried the mafioso. “What do I know? I just do what I’m told, like my older brother did—may he rest in peace—and my father—may he also rest in peace—and probably his father, which I don’t know nothin’ about.”
“It’s like succeeding generations on welfare, isn’t it?” observed Conklin. “The parasites never get off the dole.”
“Hey, that’s my family you’re talkin’ about—whatever the fuck you’re talkin’ about.”
“My apologies to your heraldry,” added Alex.
“And it’s that family of yours we’re interested in, Augie,” broke in the DCI. “It is Augie, isn’t it? That was the name on one of the five driver’s licenses and we thought it seemed most authentic.”
“Well, you’re not so authentically bright, Mr. Big Shot!” spat out the immobilized patient through his painfully swollen lips. “I got none of them names.”
“We have to call you something,” said Holland. “If only to burn it into the casing down at Hatteras so that some scale-headed archaeologist several thousand years from now can give an identity to the teeth he’s measuring.”
“How about Chauncy?” asked Conklin.
“Too ethnic,” replied Peter. “I like Asshole because that’s what he is. He’s going to be strapped into a tube and dropped over the continental shelf into six miles of seawater for crimes other people committed. I mean, that’s being an asshole.”
“Cut it out!” roared the asshole. “Awright, my name’s Nicolo … Nicholas Dellacroce, and for even giving you that you gotta get me protection! Like with Valachi, that’s part of the deal.”
“It is?” Holland frowned. “I don’t remember mentioning it.”
“Then you don’t get nuthin’!”
“You’re wrong, Nicky,” broke in Alex from across the small room. “We’re going to get everything we want, the only drawback being that it’s a one-time shot. We won’t be able to cross-examine you, or bring you into a federal court, or even have you sign a deposition.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll come out a vegetable with a refried brain. Of course, I suppose it’s a blessing in a way. You’ll hardly know it when you’re packed into that shell casing in Hatteras.”
“Hey, waddaya talkin’?”
“Simple logic,” answered the former naval commando and present head of the Central Intelligence Agency. “After our medical team gets finished with you, you can’t expect us to keep you around, can you? An autopsy would railroad us to a rock pile for thirty years and, frankly, I haven’t got that kind of time. … What’ll it be, Nicky? You want to talk to us or do you want a priest?”
“I gotta think—”
“Let’s go, Alex,” said Holland curtly, walking away from the bed toward the door. “I’ll send for a priest. This poor son of a bitch is going to need all the comfort he can get.”
“It’s times like this,” added Conklin, planting his cane on the floor and rising, “when I seriously ponder man’s inhumanity to man. Then I rationalize. It’s not brutality, for that’s only a descriptive abstraction; it’s merely the custom of the trade we’re all in. Still, there’s the individual—his mind and his flesh and his all too sensitive nerve endings. It’s the excruciating pain. Thank heavens I’ve always been in the background, out of reach—like Nicky’s associates. They dine in elegant restaurants and he goes over in a tube beyond the continental shelf, six miles down in the sea, his body imploding into itself.”
“Awright, awright!” screamed Nicolo Dellacroce, twisting on the bed, his obese frame tangling the sheets. “Ask your fuckin’ questions, but you give me protection, capisce?”
“That depends on the truthfulness of your answers,” said Holland, returning to the bed.
“I’d be very truthful, Nicky,” observed Alex, limping back to the chair. “One misstatement and you sleep with the fishes—I believe that’s the customary phrase.”
“I don’t need no coaching, I know where it’s at.”
“Let’s begin, Mr. Dellacroce,” said the CIA chief, taking a small tape recorder out of his pocket, checking the charge and placing it on the high white table by the patient’s bed. He drew up a chair and continued speaking, addressing his opening remarks to the thin silver recorder. “My name is Admiral Peter Holland, currently director of the Central Intelligence Agency, voice confirmation to be verified if necessary. This is an interview with an informer we’ll call John Smith, voice distortion to follow on interagency master tape, identification in the DCI’s classified files. … All right, Mr. Smith, we’re going to cut through the bullshit to the essential questions. I’ll generalize them as much as possible for your protection, but you’ll know exactly what I’m referring to and I expect specific answers. … Whom do you work for, Mr. Smith?”
“Atlas Coin Vending Machines, Long Island City,” replied Dellacroce, his words slurred and spoken gruffly.
“Who owns it?”
“I dunno who owns it. Most of us work from home—some fifteen, maybe twenty guys, you know what I mean? We service the machines and send in our reports.”
Holland glanced over at Conklin; both men smiled. With one answer the mafioso had placed himself within a large circle of potential informers. Nicolo was not new to the game. “Who signs your paychecks, Mr. Smith?”
“A Mr. Louis DeFazio, a very legitimate businessman, to d’best of my knowledge. He gives us our assignments.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“Brooklyn Heights. On the river, I think someone told me.”
“What was your destination when our personnel intercepted you?”
Dellacroce winced, briefly closing his swollen eyes before answering. “One of those drunk-and-dope tanks somewhere south of Philly—which you already know, Mr. Big Shot, ’cause you found the map in the car.”
Holland angrily reached for the recorder, snapping it off. “You’re on your way to Hatteras, you son of a bitch!”
“Hey, you get your info your way, I give it mine, okay? There was a map—there’s always a map—and each of us has to take those cockamamy back roads to the joint like we were driving the president or even a don superiore to an Appalachian meet. … You gimme that message pad and the pencil, I’ll give you the location right down to the brass plate on the stone gate.” The mafioso raised his uncased right arm and jabbed his index finger at the DCI. “It’ll be accurate, Mr. Big Shot, because I don’t wanna sleep with no fishes, capisce?”
“But you won’t put it on tape,” said Holland, a disturbed inflection in his voice. “Why not?”
“Tape, shit! What did you call it? An interagency master bullshit? What do you think … our people can’t tap into this place? Hoo-hah! That fuckin’ doctor of yours could be one of us!”